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Neural Network Continuous-Variable Quantum Computing

Martin Knudsen, Christian B. Mendl

Published Jan 1, 2020• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

We explore how a continuous-variable (CV) quantum computer could solve a classic differential equation, making use of its innate capability to represent real numbers in qumodes. Specifically, we construct variational CV quantum circuits [Killoran et al., Phys.~Rev.~Research 1, 033063 (2019)] to approximate the solution of one-dimensional ordinary differential equations (ODEs), with input encoding based on displacement gates and output via measurement averages. Our simulations and parameter optimization using the PennyLane / Strawberry Fields framework demonstrate good convergence for both linear and non-linear ODEs.

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We explore how a continuous-variable (CV) quantum computer could solve a classic differential equation, making use of its innate capability to represent real numbers in qumodes. Specifically, we construct variational CV quantum circuits [Killoran et al., Phys.~Rev.~Research 1, 033063 (2019)] to approximate the solution of one-dimensional ordinary differential equations (ODEs), with input encoding based on displacement gates and output via measurement averages. Our simulations and parameter optimization using the PennyLane / Strawberry Fields framework demonstrate good convergence for both linear and non-linear ODEs.
We explore how a continuous-variable (CV) quantum computer could solve a classic differential equation, making use of its innate capability to represent real numbers in qumodes. Specifically, we construct variational CV quantum circuits [Killoran et al., Phys.~Rev.~Research 1, 033063 (2019)] to approximate the solution of one-dimensional ordinary differential equations (ODEs), with input encoding based on displacement gates and output via measurement averages. Our simulations and parameter optimization using the PennyLane / Strawberry Fields framework demonstrate good convergence for both linear and non-linear ODEs.
We introduce a general method for building neural networks on quantum computers. The quantum neural network is a variational quantum circuit built in the continuous-variable (CV) architecture, which encodes quantum information in continuous degrees of freedom such as the amplitudes of the electromagnetic field. This circuit contains a layered structure of continuously parameterized gates which is universal for CV quantum computation. Affine transformations and nonlinear activation functions, two key elements in neural networks, are enacted in the quantum network using Gaussian and non-Gaussian gates, respectively. The non-Gaussian gates provide both the nonlinearity and the universality of the model. Due to the structure of the CV model, the CV quantum neural network can encode highly nonlinear transformations while remaining completely unitary. We show how a classical network can be embedded into the quantum formalism and propose quantum versions of various specialized models such as convolutional, recurrent, and residual networks. Finally, we present numerous modeling experiments built with the strawberry fields software library. These experiments, including a classifier for fraud detection, a network which generates tetris images, and a hybrid classical-quantum autoencoder, demonstrate the capability and adaptability of CV quantum neural networks.
Solving Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE) is important for a broad range of domains, such as engineering, weather forecast, and finance. Most quantum algorithms proposed to solve them revolve around transforming ODEs into a system of linear equations, in order to benefit from the exponential advantage promised by the HHL algorithm. However, there are known limitations to this subroutine such as the linear scaling with condition number. In particular, for HHL-based ODE solvers, this dependency yields a complexity that generally grows exponentially with the integration time. In this paper, we present a scheme that does not rely on the HHL subroutine. We use the Koopman Von Neumann (KvN) formalism that maps arbitrary nonlinear dynamics to a Hilbert space where the dynamics are unitary. This effectively reduces the ODE problem to a Hamiltonian time evolution, which is a well-known problem in quantum computing. However, this comes at a cost as the KvN formalism is expressed in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space, and involves nonphysical states with infinite energies. Previous works have tackled this by truncating the Hilbert space, and by approximating all the relevant states and operations on qubit-based systems. Instead of mapping to qubit-based computations, in this paper, we investigate the direct use of continuous-variable quantum computers for this problem. We provide an algorithm to compile a sequence of Gaussian and non-Gaussian continuous variables gates to solve an arbitrary one-dimensional polynomial ODE. We analyze the algorithm and propose that it is intrinsically better suited for solving so-called initial distribution problems, rather than initial condition problems. We propose the first steps towards a comprehensive complexity and specify which steps need to be developed for a complete analysis.
Audio classification is a key application in deep learning, and quantum machine learning (QML) provides new possibilities by capturing complex patterns in signals through parameterized quantum circuits. However, existing qubit-based models struggle to efficiently represent continuous-valued data common in audio processing, limiting their scalability and expressivity. Continuous Variable Quantum Computing (CVQC) offers a natural framework for processing real-valued data such as mel-spectrograms, addressing the limitations of qubit-based systems while introducing nonlinearity through non-gaussian gates to ensure universality. In CVQC, each qumode represents an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space, enabling compact yet expressive information representation. This work introduces a two-qumode Hybrid Continuous Variable Quantum Neural Network (HCVQNN) for audio classification that integrates classical neural layers with a CV quantum circuit for advanced feature extraction and encoding. Experiments conducted using PennyLane demonstrate that HCVQNN achieves comparable audio classification accuracy while requiring fewer resources compared to classical deep networks and qubit-based quantum models.
In this paper, classical and continuous variable (CV) quantum neural network hybrid multiclassifiers are presented using the MNIST dataset. The combination of cutoff dimension and probability measurement method in the CV model allows a quantum circuit to produce output vectors of size equal to n raised to the power of n where n represents cutoff dimension and m, the number of qumodes. They are then translated as one-hot encoded labels, padded with an appropriate number of zeros. The total of eight different classifiers are built using 2,3,...,8 qumodes, based on the binary classifier architecture proposed in Continuous variable quantum neural networks. The displacement gate and the Kerr gate in the CV model allow for the bias addition and nonlinear activation components of classical neural networks to quantum. The classifiers are composed of a classical feedforward neural network, a quantum data encoding circuit, and a CV quantum neural network circuit. On a truncated MNIST dataset of 600 samples, a 4 qumode hybrid classifier achieves 100% training accuracy.
Continuous Variable-based Quantum Computing (CVQC) has been developing at speed with a lot of promise in the field of quantum machine learning. It provides a direct and natural way to accommodate continuous values into the quantum computing framework. We carried out experiments on quantum simulators where we compared the results of time series forecasting on a type of continuous-variable quantum variational circuit, called CV-Quantum Neural Networks (CVQNN) for different types of time series like Energy Consumption data and stock price data. We compared their performance with a discrete variable-based variational quantum algorithm as well as with a classical Neural Network. Experiments showed that CVQNN can function just like a neural network but with a lesser number of parameters while tackling the two obstacles that are faced in qubit-based computing, which are, tackling continuous values and introducing controlled non-linearity into the circuits. We used the circuit for multi-step forecasting that performed better for a larger prediction window than one-step forecasting done iteratively on the predicted data. The resembling architecture of CVQNN with that of a neural network offers the flexibility of using a similar structure for both one-step and multi-step forecasting.