Quantum mechanics studies nature and its behavior at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. By applying quantum mechanics, a lot of problems can be solved in a more convenient way thanks to its special quantum properties, such as superposition and entanglement. In the current noisy intermediate-scale quantum era, quantum mechanics finds its use in various fields of life. Following this trend, researchers seek to augment machine learning in a quantum way. The generative adversarial network (GAN), an important machine learning invention that excellently solves generative tasks, has also been extended with quantum versions. Since the first publication of a quantum GAN (QuGAN) in 2018, many QuGAN proposals have been suggested. A QuGAN may have a fully quantum or a hybrid quantum–classical architecture, which may need additional data processing in the quantum–classical interface. Similarly to classical GANs, QuGANs are trained using a loss function in the form of max likelihood, Wasserstein distance, or total variation. The gradients of the loss function can be calculated by applying the parameter-shift method or a linear combination of unitaries in order to update the parameters of the networks. In this paper, we review recent advances in quantum GANs. We discuss the structures, optimization, and network evaluation strategies of QuGANs. Different variants of quantum GANs are presented in detail.
Quantum mechanics studies nature and its behavior at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. By applying quantum mechanics, a lot of problems can be solved in a more convenient way thanks to its special quantum properties, such as superposition and entanglement. In the current noisy intermediate-scale quantum era, quantum mechanics finds its use in various fields of life. Following this trend, researchers seek to augment machine learning in a quantum way. The generative adversarial network (GAN), an important machine learning invention that excellently solves generative tasks, has also been extended with quantum versions. Since the first publication of a quantum GAN (QuGAN) in 2018, many QuGAN proposals have been suggested. A QuGAN may have a fully quantum or a hybrid quantum–classical architecture, which may need additional data processing in the quantum–classical interface. Similarly to classical GANs, QuGANs are trained using a loss function in the form of max likelihood, Wasserstein distance, or total variation. The gradients of the loss function can be calculated by applying the parameter-shift method or a linear combination of unitaries in order to update the parameters of the networks. In this paper, we review recent advances in quantum GANs. We discuss the structures, optimization, and network evaluation strategies of QuGANs. Different variants of quantum GANs are presented in detail.
Quantum Generative Adversarial Networks (QGANs) represent a useful development in quantum machine learning, using the particular properties of quantum mechanics to solve the challenges of data analysis and modeling. This paper brings up a general analysis of five QGAN architectures, focusing on their evolution, strengths, weaknesses, and limitations in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Primary methods like Entangling Quantum GAN (EQ-GAN) and Quantum state fidelity (QuGAN) concentrate on stability, convergence, and robust performance on small-scale datasets such as 2 × 2 grayscale images. Intermediate models such as Image Quantum GAN (IQGAN) and Experimental Quantum GAN (EXQGAN) provide new ideas like trainable encoders and patch-based sub-generators that are scalable to 8 × 8 datasets with increasing noise resilience. The most advanced method is Parameterized Quantum Wasserstein GAN (PQWGAN), which uses a hybrid quantum-classical structure to obtain high-resolution image processing for 28 × 28 grayscale datasets while trying to maintain parameter efficiency. This study explores, analyzes, and summarizes critical problems of QGANs, including accuracy, convergence, parameter efficiency, image quality, performance metrics, and training stability under noisy conditions. In addition, developing QGANs can generate and train parameters in quantum approximation optimization algorithms. One of the useful applications of QGAN is generating medical datasets that can generate medical images from limited datasets to train specific medical models for the recognition of diseases.
Generative adversarial network (GAN) is one of the most promising methods for unsupervised learning in recent years. GAN works via adversarial training concept and has shown excellent performance in the fields image synthesis, image super-resolution, video generation, image translation, etc. Compared with classical algorithms, quantum algorithms have their unique advantages in dealing with complex tasks, quantum machine learning (QML) is one of the most promising quantum algorithms with the rapid development of quantum technology. Specifically, Quantum generative adversarial network (QGAN) has shown the potential exponential quantum speedups in terms of performance. Meanwhile, QGAN also exhibits some problems, such as barren plateaus, unstable gradient, model collapse, absent complete scientific evaluation system, etc. How to improve the theory of QGAN and apply it that have attracted some researcher. In this paper, we comprehensively and deeply review recently proposed GAN and QAGN models and their applications, and we discuss the existing problems and future research trends of QGAN.
Abstract Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have revolutionized Deep learning-based generative models are still challenging to train. This is due to issues such as mode collapse, instability, and non-convergence. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the challenges faced by classical GANs, offering insights into their computational flow and limitations. Additionally, it explores Quantum Generative Adversarial Networks (QuGANs), detailing their unique architecture and the mechanism of quantum information generation. To further advance the field, this work presents an in-depth analysis of a hybridized model combining classical GANs and QuGANs, leveraging the strengths of both paradigms to enhance learning and stability. Furthermore, a novel algorithm for training quantum–classical GANs is proposed, with a detailed complexity analysis to assess its computational efficiency. The integration of quantum principles into classical frameworks offers a promising direction to mitigate existing GANs limitations while unlocking new possibilities for quantum machine learning. The proposed approach aims to bridge the gap between classical and quantum generative models, improving training dynamics and sample quality. The objective of this investigation is to establish a foundation for improving the efficiency and comprehension of hybrid GANs architectures, which will allow the design of more efficient and durable generative models in quantum computing.
Tremendous progress has been witnessed in artificial intelligence, where neural network backed deep learning systems have been used, with applications in almost every domain. As a representative deep learning framework, Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) has been widely used for generating artificial images, text-to-image or image augmentation across areas of science, arts and video games. However, GANs are computationally expensive, sometimes computationally prohibitive. Furthermore, training GANs may suffer from convergence failure and modal collapse. Aiming at the acceleration of use cases for practical quantum computers, we propose QuGAN, a quantum GAN architecture that provides stable convergence, quantum-states based gradients and significantly reduced parameter sets. The QuGANarchitecture runs both the discriminator and the generator purely on quantum state fidelity and utilizes the swap test on qubits to calculate the values of quantum-based loss functions. Built on quantum layers, QuGAN achieves similar performance with a 94.98% reduction on the parameter set when compared to classical GANs. With the same number of parameters, addition-ally, QuGAN outperforms state-of-the-art quantum based GANsin the literature providing a 48.33% improvement in system performance compared to others attaining less than 0.5% in terms of similarity between generated distributions and original data sets.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are generative models that function as a minimax game, in which a generative network and a discriminative network compete against each other with the goal of creating data that convincingly resembles the real sample. With the advent of Quantum Computing and the development of Quantum Machine Learning (QML) models, Quantum Generative Adversarial Networks (QuGANs) have been increasingly studied due to the possible advantages this new type of architecture can offer, especially regarding performance improvements, scalability, and the exploration of new applications. In this context, this study's guiding question is: how were QuGANs developed between the years 2018 and 2025? To answer this question, the general objective of this work is to conduct a systematic literature review of QuGANs during the proposed period. Using a systematic literature review as the methodological basis, articles published and available on the online platforms Lens, Scopus, and Web of Science were selected, and the Rayyan tool was employed to identify duplicate works and those that did not specifically address QuGANs. As a result, a prevalence of hybrid models was observed, in which the developed architecture integrates quantum and classical characteristics in a complementary manner. Regarding the type of application, approaches involving theoretical foundations and image generation stand out as the most common. Other application areas are also explored (chemistry and pharmaceuticals, quantum error correction, high-energy physics, experimental implementation, medical applications, cloud computing, anomaly detection, telecommunications, biometrics, finance, physics and simulations, security and cryptography, software engineering, noise in QuGANs, and survey), demonstrating the broad potential of QuGANs across various research fields and industrial sectors.
Hybrid Quantum Generative Adversarial Networks (HQ-GANs) have emerged as a promising class of models at the intersection of quantum computing and generative artificial intelligence. Unlike early quantum generative approaches that relied on fully quantum pipelines, hybrid QGANs combine parameterized quantum circuits with classical optimization and discrimination mechanisms, enabling practical training under the constraints of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware. This paper presents a comprehensive technical review of hybrid QGAN architectures, with a particular focus on implicit quantum representations and hybrid optimization strategies that enhance expressivity, stability, and scalability. We analyze how recent advances in variational circuit design, data re-encoding, Wasserstein-based objectives, and hybriddepth control have reshaped the feasibility of quantum generative learning. New mathematical formulations are introduced to describe implicit quantum mappings and hybrid adversarial convergence. Comparative analysis highlights performance trends, architectural trade-offs, and unresolved challenges related to noise, barren plateaus, and hardware–software mismatch. The paper concludes by outlining future research directions toward robust, application-ready quantum generative intelligence.