Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN)

Training Ensembles of Quantum Binary Neural Networks

Daivid V. Leal, Tiago De Lima, Adenilton José da Silva

Published Jul 18, 2021• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Artificial Neural Networks (NNs) are applied to solve problems in several fields such as translation, image processing, and diagnosis of diseases. Training NNs and searching weights parameters for them is a costly task that depends on weights initialization. This problem cost increases when it is necessary to train an Ensemble of Neural Networks (ENNs). Some works explore ways to train Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) using quantum techniques with success. This paper shows a hybrid approach to train an Ensemble of Binary Neural Networks with the same computational cost to train one variational quantum circuit.

DOI
10.1109/ijcnn52387.2021.9534253

Related papers

A Hybrid Quantum-Classical Neural Network Architecture for Binary Classification

Davis Arthur, Prasanna Date

Deep learning is one of the most successful and far-reaching strategies used in machine learning today. However, the scale and utility of neural networks is still greatly limited by the current hardware used to train them. These concerns have become increasingly pressing as conventional computers quickly approach physical limitations that will slow performance improvements in years to come. For these reasons, scientists have begun to explore alternative computing platforms, like quantum computers, for training neural networks. In recent years, variational quantum circuits have emerged as one of the most successful approaches to quantum deep learning on noisy intermediate scale quantum devices. We propose a hybrid quantum-classical neural network architecture where each neuron is a variational quantum circuit. We empirically analyze the performance of this hybrid neural network on a series of binary classification data sets using a simulated universal quantum computer and a state of the art universal quantum computer. On simulated hardware, we observe that the hybrid neural network achieves roughly 10% higher classification accuracy and 20% better minimization of cost than an individual variational quantum circuit. On quantum hardware, we observe that each model only performs well when the qubit and gate count is sufficiently small.

arXiv:2201.01820•Jan 5, 2022•20 citations

Grover's Implementation of Quantum Binary Neural Networks

Brody Wrighter, Sonia López Alarcón

Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) are the result of a simplification of network parameters in Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). The computational complexity of training ANNs increases significantly as the size of the network increases. This complexity can be greatly reduced if the parameters of the network are binarized. Binarization, which is a one bit quantization, can also come with complications including error and information loss. The implementation of BNNs on quantum hardware could potentially provide a computational advantage over its classical counterpart. This is due to the fact that binarized parameters fit nicely to the nature of quantum hardware. Quantum superposition allows the network to be trained more efficiently, without using back propagation techniques, with the application of Grover's Algorithm for the training process. This paper looks into two BNN designs that utilize only quantum hardware, as opposed to hybrid quantum-classical implementations. It also provides practical implementations for both of them. Looking into their scalability, improvements on the design are proposed to reduce complexity even further.

IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE)•Sep 17, 2023•2 citations

Hybrid Quantum-Classical Neural Networks

Davis Arthur, Prasanna Date

Deep learning is one of the most successful and far-reaching strategies used in machine learning today. However, the scale and utility of neural networks is still greatly limited by the current hardware used to train them. These concerns have become increasingly pressing as conventional computers are soon expected to approach the physical limitations that will slow their performance improvements in the near future. For these reasons, scientists have begun to explore alternative computing platforms, like quantum computers, for training neural networks. In recent years, variational quantum circuits have emerged as one of the most successful approaches to quantum deep learning on noisy intermediate scale quantum devices. We propose a hybrid quantum-classical neural network architecture where each neuron is a variational quantum circuit. We empirically analyze the performance of this hybrid neural network on a series of binary classification data sets using a simulated IBM universal quantum computer and a state-of-the-art IBM universal quantum computer. On the simulated hardware, we observe that the hybrid neural network achieves around 10% higher classification accuracy and 20% better minimization of the cost function than an individual variational quantum circuit. On the quantum hardware, we observe that each model only performs well when the qubit and gate count is sufficiently small.

IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE)•Sep 1, 2022•54 citations

Quantum HyperNetworks: Training Binary Neural Networks in Quantum Superposition

Juan Carrasquilla, Mohamed Hibat-Allah, Estelle M. Inack +4 more

Binary neural networks, i.e., neural networks whose parameters and activations are constrained to only two possible values, offer a compelling avenue for the deployment of deep learning models on energy- and memory-limited devices. However, their training, architectural design, and hyperparameter tuning remain challenging as these involve multiple computationally expensive combinatorial optimization problems. Here we introduce quantum hypernetworks as a mechanism to train binary neural networks on quantum computers, which unify the search over parameters, hyperparameters, and architectures in a single optimization loop. Through classical simulations, we demonstrate that our approach effectively finds optimal parameters, hyperparameters and architectural choices with high probability on classification problems including a two-dimensional Gaussian dataset and a scaled-down version of the MNIST handwritten digits. We represent our quantum hypernetworks as variational quantum circuits, and find that an optimal circuit depth maximizes the probability of finding performant binary neural networks. Our unified approach provides an immense scope for other applications in the field of machine learning.

arXiv:2301.08292•Jan 19, 2023•1 citation

Quantum advantage in training binary neural networks

Yidong Liao, Daniel Ebler, Feiyang Liu +1 more

The performance of a neural network for a given task is largely determined by the initial calibration of the network parameters. Yet, it has been shown that the calibration, also referred to as training, is generally NP-complete. This includes networks with binary weights, an important class of networks due to their practical hardware implementations. We therefore suggest an alternative approach to training binary neural networks. It utilizes a quantum superposition of weight configurations. We show that the quantum training guarantees with high probability convergence towards the globally optimal set of network parameters. This resolves two prominent issues of classical training: (1) the vanishing gradient problem and (2) common convergence to suboptimal network parameters. Moreover we achieve a provable polynomial---sometimes exponential---speedup over classical training for certain classes of tasks. We design an explicit training algorithm and implement it in numerical simulations.

arXiv:1810.12948•Oct 30, 2018•3 citations

Quantum speed-up in global optimization of binary neural nets

Yidong Liao, Daniel Ebler, Feiyang Liu +1 more

Abstract The performance of a neural network (NN) for a given task is largely determined by the initial calibration of the network parameters. Yet, it has been shown that the calibration, also referred to as training, is generally NP-complete. This includes networks with binary weights, an important class of networks due to their practical hardware implementations. We therefore suggest an alternative approach to training binary NNs. It utilizes a quantum superposition of weight configurations. We show that the quantum training guarantees with high probability convergence towards the globally optimal set of network parameters. This resolves two prominent issues of classical training: (1) the vanishing gradient problem and (2) common convergence to sub-optimal network parameters. We prove that a solution is found after approximately 4 n 2 log n δ N ˜ calls to a comparing oracle, where δ represents a precision, n is the number of training inputs and N ˜ is the number of weight configurations. We give the explicit algorithm and implement it in numerical simulations.

New Journal of Physics•Nov 12, 2020•4 citations
Artificial Neural Networks (NNs) are applied to solve problems in several fields such as translation, image processing, and diagnosis of diseases. Training NNs and searching weights parameters for them is a costly task that depends on weights initialization. This problem cost increases when it is necessary to train an Ensemble of Neural Networks (ENNs). Some works explore ways to train Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) using quantum techniques with success. This paper shows a hybrid approach to train an Ensemble of Binary Neural Networks with the same computational cost to train one variational quantum circuit.
Deep learning is one of the most successful and far-reaching strategies used in machine learning today. However, the scale and utility of neural networks is still greatly limited by the current hardware used to train them. These concerns have become increasingly pressing as conventional computers quickly approach physical limitations that will slow performance improvements in years to come. For these reasons, scientists have begun to explore alternative computing platforms, like quantum computers, for training neural networks. In recent years, variational quantum circuits have emerged as one of the most successful approaches to quantum deep learning on noisy intermediate scale quantum devices. We propose a hybrid quantum-classical neural network architecture where each neuron is a variational quantum circuit. We empirically analyze the performance of this hybrid neural network on a series of binary classification data sets using a simulated universal quantum computer and a state of the art universal quantum computer. On simulated hardware, we observe that the hybrid neural network achieves roughly 10% higher classification accuracy and 20% better minimization of cost than an individual variational quantum circuit. On quantum hardware, we observe that each model only performs well when the qubit and gate count is sufficiently small.
Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) are the result of a simplification of network parameters in Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). The computational complexity of training ANNs increases significantly as the size of the network increases. This complexity can be greatly reduced if the parameters of the network are binarized. Binarization, which is a one bit quantization, can also come with complications including error and information loss. The implementation of BNNs on quantum hardware could potentially provide a computational advantage over its classical counterpart. This is due to the fact that binarized parameters fit nicely to the nature of quantum hardware. Quantum superposition allows the network to be trained more efficiently, without using back propagation techniques, with the application of Grover's Algorithm for the training process. This paper looks into two BNN designs that utilize only quantum hardware, as opposed to hybrid quantum-classical implementations. It also provides practical implementations for both of them. Looking into their scalability, improvements on the design are proposed to reduce complexity even further.
Deep learning is one of the most successful and far-reaching strategies used in machine learning today. However, the scale and utility of neural networks is still greatly limited by the current hardware used to train them. These concerns have become increasingly pressing as conventional computers are soon expected to approach the physical limitations that will slow their performance improvements in the near future. For these reasons, scientists have begun to explore alternative computing platforms, like quantum computers, for training neural networks. In recent years, variational quantum circuits have emerged as one of the most successful approaches to quantum deep learning on noisy intermediate scale quantum devices. We propose a hybrid quantum-classical neural network architecture where each neuron is a variational quantum circuit. We empirically analyze the performance of this hybrid neural network on a series of binary classification data sets using a simulated IBM universal quantum computer and a state-of-the-art IBM universal quantum computer. On the simulated hardware, we observe that the hybrid neural network achieves around 10% higher classification accuracy and 20% better minimization of the cost function than an individual variational quantum circuit. On the quantum hardware, we observe that each model only performs well when the qubit and gate count is sufficiently small.
Binary neural networks, i.e., neural networks whose parameters and activations are constrained to only two possible values, offer a compelling avenue for the deployment of deep learning models on energy- and memory-limited devices. However, their training, architectural design, and hyperparameter tuning remain challenging as these involve multiple computationally expensive combinatorial optimization problems. Here we introduce quantum hypernetworks as a mechanism to train binary neural networks on quantum computers, which unify the search over parameters, hyperparameters, and architectures in a single optimization loop. Through classical simulations, we demonstrate that our approach effectively finds optimal parameters, hyperparameters and architectural choices with high probability on classification problems including a two-dimensional Gaussian dataset and a scaled-down version of the MNIST handwritten digits. We represent our quantum hypernetworks as variational quantum circuits, and find that an optimal circuit depth maximizes the probability of finding performant binary neural networks. Our unified approach provides an immense scope for other applications in the field of machine learning.
The performance of a neural network for a given task is largely determined by the initial calibration of the network parameters. Yet, it has been shown that the calibration, also referred to as training, is generally NP-complete. This includes networks with binary weights, an important class of networks due to their practical hardware implementations. We therefore suggest an alternative approach to training binary neural networks. It utilizes a quantum superposition of weight configurations. We show that the quantum training guarantees with high probability convergence towards the globally optimal set of network parameters. This resolves two prominent issues of classical training: (1) the vanishing gradient problem and (2) common convergence to suboptimal network parameters. Moreover we achieve a provable polynomial---sometimes exponential---speedup over classical training for certain classes of tasks. We design an explicit training algorithm and implement it in numerical simulations.
Abstract The performance of a neural network (NN) for a given task is largely determined by the initial calibration of the network parameters. Yet, it has been shown that the calibration, also referred to as training, is generally NP-complete. This includes networks with binary weights, an important class of networks due to their practical hardware implementations. We therefore suggest an alternative approach to training binary NNs. It utilizes a quantum superposition of weight configurations. We show that the quantum training guarantees with high probability convergence towards the globally optimal set of network parameters. This resolves two prominent issues of classical training: (1) the vanishing gradient problem and (2) common convergence to sub-optimal network parameters. We prove that a solution is found after approximately 4 n 2 log n δ N ˜ calls to a comparing oracle, where δ represents a precision, n is the number of training inputs and N ˜ is the number of weight configurations. We give the explicit algorithm and implement it in numerical simulations.