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International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR)

Using and Evaluating Quantum Computing for Information Retrieval and Recommender Systems

Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema, Andrea Pasin, Paolo Cremonesi, Nicola Ferro

Published Jul 10, 2024• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The field of Quantum Computing (QC) has gained significant popularity in recent years, due to its potential to provide benefits in terms of efficiency and effectiveness when employed to solve certain computationally intensive tasks. In both Information Retrieval (IR) and Recommender Systems (RS) we are required to build methods that apply complex processing on large and heterogeneous datasets, it is natural therefore to wonder whether QC could also be applied to boost their performance. The tutorial aims to provide first an introduction to QC for an audience that is not familiar with the technology, then to show how to apply the QC paradigm of Quantum Annealing (QA) to solve practical problems that are currently faced by IR and RS systems. During the tutorial, participants will be provided with the fundamentals required to understand QC and to apply it in practice by using a real D-Wave quantum annealer through APIs.

DOI
10.1145/3626772.3661378

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The field of Quantum Computing (QC) has gained significant popularity in recent years, due to its potential to provide benefits in terms of efficiency and effectiveness when employed to solve certain computationally intensive tasks. In both Information Retrieval (IR) and Recommender Systems (RS) we are required to build methods that apply complex processing on large and heterogeneous datasets, it is natural therefore to wonder whether QC could also be applied to boost their performance. The tutorial aims to provide first an introduction to QC for an audience that is not familiar with the technology, then to show how to apply the QC paradigm of Quantum Annealing (QA) to solve practical problems that are currently faced by IR and RS systems. During the tutorial, participants will be provided with the fundamentals required to understand QC and to apply it in practice by using a real D-Wave quantum annealer through APIs.
The emerging field of Quantum Computing (QC) is attracting considerable research interest due to its potential. It is in fact believed that QC could revolutionize the way we approach complex problems by significantly reducing the time required to solve them. Although QC is still in its early stages of development, certain problems can already be addressed using quantum computers, offering a glimpse into its capabilities. The goal of the QuantumCLEF lab is to raise awareness of QC and to design, develop, and evaluate new QC algorithms aimed at solving challenges typically encountered in the implementation of Information Retrieval (IR) and Recommender Systems (RS). Furthermore, the lab provides a valuable opportunity to engage with QC technologies, which are often difficult to access. In this work, we present an overview of the second edition of QuantumCLEF, a lab focused on applying Quantum Annealing (QA), a specific QC paradigm, to three tasks: Feature Selection for IR and RS systems, Instance Selection for IR systems, and Clustering for IR systems. A total of 44 teams registered for the lab, with 5 teams successfully submitting their runs in accordance with the lab guidelines. Given the novelty of the topics, participants were provided with extensive examples and comprehensive materials to help them understand how QA works and how to program quantum annealers.
Recommendation systems play a key role in everyday life; they are used to suggest items that are selected among many candidates that usually belong to huge datasets. The recommendations require a good performance both in terms of speed and the effectiveness of the provided suggestions. At the same time, one of the most challenging approaches in computer science is quantum computing. This computational paradigm can provide significant acceleration for resource-demanding and time-consuming algorithms. It has become very popular in recent years, thanks to the different tools available to the scientific and technical communities. Since performance has great relevance in recommendation systems, many researchers in the scientific community have recently proposed different improvements that exploit quantum approaches to provide better performance in recommendation systems. This paper gives an overview of the current state of the art in the literature, outlining the different proposed methodologies and techniques and highlighting the challenges that arise from this new approach to the recommendation systems domain.
The promise of quantum computing to open new unexplored possibilities in several scientific fields has been long discussed, but until recently the lack of a functional quantum computer has confined this discussion mostly to theoretical algorithmic papers. It was only in the last few years that small but functional quantum computers have become available to the broader research community. One paradigm in particular, quantum annealing, can be used to sample optimal solutions for a number of NP-hard optimization problems represented with classical operations research tools, providing an easy access to the potential of this emerging technology. One of the tasks that most naturally fits in this mathematical formulation is feature selection. In this paper, we investigate how to design a hybrid feature selection algorithm for recommender systems that leverages the domain knowledge and behavior hidden in the user interactions data. We represent the feature selection as an optimization problem and solve it on a real quantum computer, provided by D-Wave. The results indicate that the proposed approach is effective in selecting a limited set of important features and that quantum computers are becoming powerful enough to enter the wider realm of applied science.
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After decades of being mainly confined to theoretical research, Quantum Computing is now becoming a useful tool for solving realistic problems. This work aims to experimentally explore the feasibility of using currently available quantum computers, based on the Quantum Annealing paradigm, to build a recommender system exploiting community detection. Community detection, by partitioning users and items into densely connected clusters, can boost the accuracy of non-personalized recommendation by assuming that users within each community share similar tastes. However, community detection is a computationally expensive process. The recent availability of Quantum Annealers as cloud-based devices, constitutes a new and promising direction to explore community detection, although effectively leveraging this new technology is a long-term path that still requires advancements in both hardware and algorithms. This work aims to begin this path by assessing the quality of community detection formulated as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization problem on a real recommendation scenario. Results on several datasets show that the quantum solver is able to detect communities of comparable quality with respect to classical solvers, but with better speedup, and the non-personalized recommendation models built on top of these communities exhibit improved recommendation quality. The takeaway is that quantum computing, although in its early stages of maturity and applicability, shows promise in its ability to support new recommendation models and to bring improved scalability as technology evolves.