Reservoir induced activation of a quantum neuron

Vladimir Veselov

Wei Hu

Google’s AlphaGo represents the impressive performance of deep learning and the backbone of deep learning is the workhorse of highly versatile neural networks. Each network is made up of layers of interconnected neurons and the nonlinear activation function inside each neuron is one of the key factors that account for the unprecedented achievement of deep learning. Learning how to create quantum neural networks has been a long time pursuit since 1990’s from many researchers, unfortunately without much success. The main challenge is to know how to design a nonlinear activation function inside the quantum neuron, because the laws in quantum mechanics require the operations on quantum neurons be unitary and linear. A recent discovery uses a special quantum circuit technique called repeat-until-success to make a nonlinear activation function inside a quantum neuron, which is the hard part of creating this neuron. However, the activation function used in that work is based on the periodic tangent function. Because of this periodicity, the input to this function has to be restricted to the range of [0, π/2), which is a serious constraint for its applications in real world problems. The function’s periodicity also makes its neurons not suited for being trained with gradient descent as its derivatives oscillate. The purpose of our study is to propose a new nonlinear activation function that is not periodic so it can take any real numbers and its neurons can be trained with efficient gradient descent. Our quantum neuron offers the full benefit as a quantum entity to support superposition, entanglement, interference, while also enjoys the full benefit as a classical entity to take any real numbers as its input and can be trained with gradient descent. The performance of the quantum neurons with our new activation function is analyzed on IBM’s 5Q quantum computer and IBM’s quantum simulator.

LIFei, ZhaoShengmei, ZhengBaoyu

Ufuk Korkmaz, S. Elham Mousavigharalari, B. Uğur Töreyin +1 more

Jonathan H. A. de Carvalho, Fernando M. de Paula Neto

Quantum computing has been revolutionizing the development of algorithms. However, only noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices are available currently, which imposes several restrictions on the circuit implementation of quantum algorithms. In this article, we propose a framework that builds quantum neurons based on kernel machines, where the quantum neurons differ from each other by their feature space mappings. Besides contemplating previous quantum neurons, our generalized framework has the capacity to instantiate other feature mappings that allow us to solve real problems better. Under that framework, we present a neuron that applies a tensor-product feature mapping to an exponentially larger space. The proposed neuron is implemented by a circuit of constant depth with a linear number of elementary single-qubit gates. The previous quantum neuron applies a phase-based feature mapping with an exponentially expensive circuit implementation, even using multiqubit gates. Additionally, the proposed neuron has parameters that can change its activation function shape. Here, we show the activation function shape of each quantum neuron. It turns out that parametrization allows the proposed neuron to optimally fit underlying patterns that the existing neuron cannot fit, as demonstrated in the nonlinear toy classification problems addressed here. The feasibility of those quantum neuron solutions is also contemplated in the demonstration through executions on a quantum simulator. Finally, we compare those kernel-based quantum neurons in the problem of handwritten digit recognition, where the performances of quantum neurons that implement classical activation functions are also contrasted here. The repeated evidence of the parametrization potential achieved in real-life problems allows concluding that this work provides a quantum neuron with improved discriminative abilities. As a consequence, the generalized framework of quantum neurons can contribute toward practical quantum advantage.

Lei Lyu, Chen Pang, Jihua Wang