Hierarchical quantum classifiers

Kyungdeock Park, Carsten Blank, June‐Koo Kevin Rhee +1 more

Amira Abbas, Maria Schuld, Francesco Petruccione

He Wang, Chuanbo Liu, Jin Wang

Prashant Gohel, Manjunath V. Joshi

Edward Grant, Marcello Benedetti, Shuxiang Cao +5 more

Abstract Quantum circuits with hierarchical structure have been used to perform binary classification of classical data encoded in a quantum state. We demonstrate that more expressive circuits in the same family achieve better accuracy and can be used to classify highly entangled quantum states, for which there is no known efficient classical method. We compare performance for several different parameterizations on two classical machine learning datasets, Iris and MNIST, and on a synthetic dataset of quantum states. Finally, we demonstrate that performance is robust to noise and deploy an Iris dataset classifier on the ibmqx4 quantum computer.

Taehyun Kim, Israel F. Araujo, Daniel K. Park

Hierarchical quantum classifiers, such as quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNNs), represent recent progress toward designing effective and feasible architectures for quantum classification. However, their performance on near-term quantum hardware remains highly sensitive to noise accumulation across circuit depth, calling for strategies beyond circuit-architecture design alone. We propose a noise-adaptive hybrid QCNN that improves classification under noise by exploiting depth-stratified intermediate measurements. Instead of discarding qubits removed during pooling operations, we measure them and use the resulting outcomes as classical features that are jointly processed by a classical neural network. This hybrid hierarchical design enables noise-adaptive inference by integrating quantum intermediate measurements with classical post-processing. Systematic experiments across multiple circuit sizes and noise settings, including hardware-calibrated noise models derived from IBM Quantum backend data, demonstrate more stable convergence, reduced loss variability, and consistently higher classification accuracy compared with standard QCNNs. Moreover, we observe that this performance advantage significantly amplifies as the circuit size increases, confirming that the hybrid architecture mitigates the scaling limitations of standard architectures. Notably, the multi-basis measurement variant attains performance close to the noiseless limit even under realistic noise. While demonstrated for QCNNs, the proposed depth-stratified feature extraction applies more broadly to hierarchical quantum classifiers that progressively discard qubits.