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Multi-Layered Projected Entangled Pair States for Image Classification

Lei Li, Hong Lai

Published Mar 14, 2023• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Tensor networks have been recognized as a powerful numerical tool; they are applied in various fields, including physics, computer science, and more. The idea of a tensor network originates from quantum physics as an efficient representation of quantum many-body states and their operations. Matrix product states (MPS) form one of the simplest tensor networks and have been applied to machine learning for image classification. However, MPS has certain limitations when processing two-dimensional images, meaning that it is preferable for an projected entangled pair states (PEPS) tensor network with a similar structure to the image to be introduced into machine learning. PEPS tensor networks are significantly superior to other tensor networks on the image classification task. Based on a PEPS tensor network, this paper constructs a multi-layered PEPS (MLPEPS) tensor network model for image classification. PEPS is used to extract features layer by layer from the image mapped to the Hilbert space, which fully utilizes the correlation between pixels while retaining the global structural information of the image. When performing classification tasks on the Fashion-MNIST dataset, MLPEPS achieves a classification accuracy of 90.44%, exceeding tensor network models such as the original PEPS. On the COVID-19 radiography dataset, MLPEPS has a test set accuracy of 91.63%, which is very close to the results of GoogLeNet. Under the same experimental conditions, the learning ability of MLPEPS is already close to that of existing neural networks while having fewer parameters. MLPEPS can be used to build different network models by modifying the structure, and as such it has great potential in machine learning.

DOI
10.3390/su15065120

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Tensor networks have been recognized as a powerful numerical tool; they are applied in various fields, including physics, computer science, and more. The idea of a tensor network originates from quantum physics as an efficient representation of quantum many-body states and their operations. Matrix product states (MPS) form one of the simplest tensor networks and have been applied to machine learning for image classification. However, MPS has certain limitations when processing two-dimensional images, meaning that it is preferable for an projected entangled pair states (PEPS) tensor network with a similar structure to the image to be introduced into machine learning. PEPS tensor networks are significantly superior to other tensor networks on the image classification task. Based on a PEPS tensor network, this paper constructs a multi-layered PEPS (MLPEPS) tensor network model for image classification. PEPS is used to extract features layer by layer from the image mapped to the Hilbert space, which fully utilizes the correlation between pixels while retaining the global structural information of the image. When performing classification tasks on the Fashion-MNIST dataset, MLPEPS achieves a classification accuracy of 90.44%, exceeding tensor network models such as the original PEPS. On the COVID-19 radiography dataset, MLPEPS has a test set accuracy of 91.63%, which is very close to the results of GoogLeNet. Under the same experimental conditions, the learning ability of MLPEPS is already close to that of existing neural networks while having fewer parameters. MLPEPS can be used to build different network models by modifying the structure, and as such it has great potential in machine learning.
Tensor networks, a model that originated from quantum physics, has been gradually generalized as efficient models in machine learning in recent years. However, in order to achieve exact contraction, only treelike tensor networks such as the matrix product states and tree tensor networks have been considered, even for modeling two-dimensional data such as images. In this work, we construct supervised learning models for images using the projected entangled pair states (PEPS), a two-dimensional tensor network having a similar structure prior to natural images. Our approach first performs a feature map, which transforms the image data to a product state on a grid, then contracts the product state to a PEPS with trainable parameters to predict image labels. The tensor elements of PEPS are trained by minimizing differences between training labels and predicted labels. The proposed model is evaluated on image classifications using the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology database (MNIST) and the Fashion-MNIST datasets. We show that our model is significantly superior to existing models using treelike tensor networks. Moreover, using the same input features, our method performs as well as the multilayer perceptron classifier, but with much fewer parameters and is more stable. Our results shed light on potential applications of two-dimensional tensor network models in machine learning.
The recently introduced locally orderless tensor network (LoTeNet) for supervised image classification uses matrix product state (MPS) operations on grids of transformed image patches. The resulting patch representations are combined back together into the image space and aggregated hierarchically using multiple MPS blocks per layer to obtain the final decision rules. In this work, we propose a non-patch based modification to LoTeNet that performs one MPS operation per layer, instead of several patch-level operations. The spatial information in the input images to MPS blocks at each layer is squeezed into the feature dimension, similar to LoTeNet, to maximise retained spatial correlation between pixels when images are flattened into 1D vectors. The proposed multi-layered tensor network (MLTN) is capable of learning linear decision boundaries in high dimensional spaces in a multi-layered setting, which results in a reduction in the computation cost compared to LoTeNet without any degradation in performance.
Tensor network, which originates from quantum physics, is emerging as an efficient tool for classical and quantum machine learning. Nevertheless, there still exists a considerable accuracy gap between tensor network and the sophisticated neural network models for classical machine learning. In this work, we combine the ideas of matrix product state (MPS), the simplest tensor network structure, and residual neural network and propose the residual matrix product state (ResMPS). The ResMPS can be treated as a network where its layers map the "hidden" features to the outputs (e.g., classifications), and the variational parameters of the layers are the functions of the features of the samples (e.g., pixels of images). This is different from neural network, where the layers map feed-forwardly the features to the output. The ResMPS can equip with the non-linear activations and dropout layers, and outperforms the state-of-the-art tensor network models in terms of efficiency, stability, and expression power. Besides, ResMPS is interpretable from the perspective of polynomial expansion, where the factorization and exponential machines naturally emerge. Our work contributes to connecting and hybridizing neural and tensor networks, which is crucial to further enhance our understanding of the working mechanisms and improve the performance of both models.
Tensor networks, originally designed to address computational problems in quantum many-body physics, have recently been applied to machine learning tasks. However, compared to quantum physics, where the reasons for the success of tensor network approaches over the last 30 years is well understood, very little is yet known about why these techniques work for machine learning. The goal of this paper is to investigate entanglement properties of tensor network models in a current machine learning application, in order to uncover general principles that may guide future developments. We revisit the use of tensor networks for supervised image classification using the MNIST data set of handwritten digits, as pioneered by Stoudenmire and Schwab [Adv. in Neur. Inform. Proc. Sys. 29, 4799 (2016)]. Firstly we hypothesize about which state the tensor network might be learning during training. For that purpose, we propose a plausible candidate state ∣Σℓ⟩|Σ_{\ell}\rangle∣Σℓ​⟩ (built as a superposition of product states corresponding to images in the training set) and investigate its entanglement properties. We conclude that ∣Σℓ⟩|Σ_{\ell}\rangle∣Σℓ​⟩ is so robustly entangled that it cannot be approximated by the tensor network used in that work, which must therefore be representing a very different state. Secondly, we use tensor networks with a block product structure, in which entanglement is restricted within small blocks of n×nn \times nn×n pixels/qubits. We find that these states are extremely expressive (e.g. training accuracy of 99.97%99.97 \%99.97% already for n=2n=2n=2), suggesting that long-range entanglement may not be essential for image classification. However, in our current implementation, optimization leads to over-fitting, resulting in test accuracies that are not competitive with other current approaches.
It is a hot topic how entanglement, a quantity from quantum information theory, can assist machine learning. In this work, we implement numerical experiments to classify patterns/images by representing the classifiers as matrix product states (MPS). We show how entanglement can interpret machine learning by characterizing the importance of data and propose a feature extraction algorithm. We show on the MNIST dataset that when reducing the number of the retained pixels to 1/10 of the original number, the decrease of the ten-class testing accuracy is only O (10–3), which significantly improves the efficiency of the MPS machine learning. Our work improves machine learning’s interpretability and efficiency under the MPS representation by using the properties of MPS representing entanglement.
With the increasing adoption of machine learning tools like neural networks across several domains, interesting connections and comparisons to concepts from other domains are coming to light. In this work, we focus on the class of Tensor Networks, which has been a work horse for physicists in the last two decades to analyse quantum many-body systems. Building on the recent interest in tensor networks for machine learning, we extend the Matrix Product State tensor networks (which can be interpreted as linear classifiers operating in exponentially high dimensional spaces) to be useful in medical image analysis tasks. We focus on classification problems as a first step where we motivate the use of tensor networks and propose adaptions for 2D images using classical image domain concepts such as local orderlessness of images. With the proposed locally orderless tensor network model (LoTeNet), we show that tensor networks are capable of attaining performance that is comparable to state-of-the-art deep learning methods. We evaluate the model on two publicly available medical imaging datasets and show performance improvements with fewer model hyperparameters and lesser computational resources compared to relevant baseline methods.