Abstract As quantum computers are based on the laws of quantum mechanics, they are capable of solving certain problems faster than their classical counterparts. However, quantum algorithms with a theoretical speed‐up often assume that data can be loaded efficiently. In general, the runtime complexity of the loading routine depends on (i) the data encoding that defines how the data is represented by the state of the quantum computer and (ii) the data itself. In some cases, loading the data requires at least exponential time that destroys a potential speed‐up. And especially for the first generation of devices that are currently available, the resources (qubits and operations) needed to encode the data are limited. In this work, we, therefore, present six patterns that describe how data is handled by quantum computers.
Abstract As quantum computers are based on the laws of quantum mechanics, they are capable of solving certain problems faster than their classical counterparts. However, quantum algorithms with a theoretical speed‐up often assume that data can be loaded efficiently. In general, the runtime complexity of the loading routine depends on (i) the data encoding that defines how the data is represented by the state of the quantum computer and (ii) the data itself. In some cases, loading the data requires at least exponential time that destroys a potential speed‐up. And especially for the first generation of devices that are currently available, the resources (qubits and operations) needed to encode the data are limited. In this work, we, therefore, present six patterns that describe how data is handled by quantum computers.
As quantum computers are based on the laws of quantum mechanics, they are capable of solving certain problems faster than their classical counterparts. However, often algorithms which a theoretical speed-up assume that data can be loaded efficiently. In general, the runtime complexity of the loading routine depends on (i) the data encoding that defines how the data is represented and (ii) the data itself. In some cases, loading the data requires at least exponential time which destroys a potential speed-up. And especially for the first generation of devices that are currently available, the resources (qubits and operations) needed to encode the data are limited. Therefore, understanding the consequences of a particular data encoding is crucial. To capture knowledge about different encodings, we present two data encoding patterns that extend our previous collection of encoding patterns [1].
The use of quantum processing units (QPUs) promises speed-ups for solving computational problems, in particular for discrete optimisation. While a few groundbreaking algorithmic approaches are known that can provably outperform classical computers, we observe a scarcity of programming abstractions for constructing efficient quantum algorithms. A good fraction of the literature that addresses solving concrete problems related to database management concentrates on casting them as quadratic unconstrained binary optimisation problems (QUBOs), which can then, among others, be processed on gate-based machines (using the quantum approximate optimisation algorithm), or quantum annealers. A critical aspect that affects efficiency and scalability of either of these approaches is how classical data are loaded into qubits, respectively how problems are encoded into QUBO representation. The effectiveness of encodings is known to be of crucial importance for quantum computers, especially since the amount of available qubits is strongly limited in the era of noisy, intermediate-size quantum computers.
Encoding classical data into quantum systems is a foundational step in the execution of nearly all quantum algorithms, and a critical bottleneck in realizing practical quantum advantage. This review provides a comprehensive account of the concepts, algorithms, and practical considerations associated with quantum data encoding. We trace the development from its early conceptual foundations to recent advances, considering commonly used access models, such as quantum state preparation, unitary synthesis, QRAM and block encoding. We survey the circuit size, depth, space-time tradeoffs, as well as non-Clifford resources required for fault-tolerant implementation. We also discuss the roles of different access models in quantum algorithms. Special attention is given to structured data, such as sparse data, Boolean functions and data represented by tensor networks. This review bridges theory and applications, serving both as a pedagogical guide for newcomers and as a reference for active researchers. We also highlight the pivotal role of quantum data encoding in quantum computing and provide insights into future directions that will enable quantum advantage.
Modern computing has achieved extraordinary scale and speed. Electronic computers emerged commercially in the mid-20th century, and classical computing has since scaled through architectural advances and parallelism. However, many scientifically important problems remain computationally expensive because the underlying state spaces grow exponentially. Quantum computing addresses this challenge by representing and transforming information using quantum-mechanical state vectors and unitary operations. These conventional systems are referred to as classical computers, capable of handling everyday tasks with moderate computational power and speed. Classical computers represent information using bits and process it using deterministic logic operations. While modern classical systems use extensive parallelism (multi-core CPUs, GPUs, and clusters), many important problems still scale poorly because the resources required grow rapidly with input size. Even with significant parallelism, complex problems that involve large combinatorial structures or high-dimensional state spaces often require substantial computational time and resources, motivating the need for more powerful computational paradigms capable of handling such workloads.
Abstract Complex quantum circuits are constituted by combinations of quantum subroutines. The computation is possible as long as the quantum data encoding is consistent throughout the circuit. Despite its fundamental importance, the formalization of quantum data encoding has never been addressed systematically so far. We formalize the concept of quantum data encoding, namely the format providing a representation of a data set through a quantum state, as a distinct abstract layer with respect to the associated data loading circuit. We survey existing encoding methods and their respective strategies for classical-to-quantum exact and approximate data loading, for the quantum-to-classical extraction of information from states, and for quantum-to-quantum encoding conversion. Next, we show how major quantum algorithms find a natural interpretation in terms of data loading. For instance, the quantum Fourier transform is described as a quantum encoding converter, while the quantum amplitude estimation as an extraction routine. The new conceptual framework is exemplified by considering its application to the simple case of the Bernstein–Vazirani algorithm, and then to quantum-based Monte Carlo simulations, thus showcasing the power of the proposed formalism for the description of complex quantum circuits. Indeed, the approach clarifies the structure of complex quantum circuits and enables their efficient design.
Quantum computing has a potential to accelerate data processing efficiency, especially in machine learning, by exploiting special features such as the quantum interference. The major challenge in this application is that, in general, the task of loading a classical data vector into a quantum state requires an exponential number of quantum gates. The approximate amplitude encoding (AAE) method, which uses a variational means to approximately load a given real-valued data vector into the amplitude of a quantum state, was recently proposed as a general approach to this problem mainly for near-term devices. However, AAE cannot load a complex-valued data vector, which narrows its application range. In this work, we extend AAE so that it can handle a complex-valued data vector. The key idea is to employ the fidelity distance as a cost function for optimizing a parametrized quantum circuit, where the classical shadow technique is used to efficiently estimate the fidelity and its gradient. We apply this algorithm to realize the complex-valued-kernel binary classifier called the compact Hadamard classifier, and then we present a numerical experiment showing that it enables classification of the Iris dataset and credit card fraud detection.