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IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications

Hybrid Quantum-Classical Neural Networks for Downlink Beamforming Optimization

Juping Zhang, Gan Zheng, Toshiaki Koike–Akino, Kai‐Kit Wong, Fraser A. Burton

Published Aug 19, 2024• 34 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This paper investigates quantum machine learning to optimize the beamforming in a multiuser multiple-input single-output downlink system. We aim to combine the power of quantum neural networks and the success of classical deep neural networks to enhance the learning performance. Specifically, we propose two hybrid quantum-classical neural networks to maximize the sum rate of a downlink system. The first one proposes a quantum neural network employing parameterized quantum circuits that follows a classical convolutional neural network. The classical neural network can be jointly trained with the quantum neural network or pre-trained leading to a fine-tuning transfer learning method. The second one designs a quantum convolutional neural network to better extract features followed by a classical deep neural network. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed hybrid neural networks, and reveal that the first method can achieve similar sum rate performance compared to a benchmark classical neural network with significantly less training parameters; while the second method can achieve higher sum rate especially in presence of many users still with less training parameters. The robustness of the proposed methods is verified using both software simulators and hardware emulators considering noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.

DOI
10.1109/twc.2024.3442091

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We introduce a hybrid Quantum Neural Networks (QNN) architecture for the efficient user scheduling in 5G/Beyond 5G (B5G) massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) systems, addressing the scalability issues of traditional methods. By leveraging statistical Channel State Information (CSI), our model reduces computational overhead and enhances spectral efficiency. It integrates classical neural networks with a variational quantum circuit kernel, outperforming classical Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and maintaining robust performance in noisy channels. This demonstrates the potential of quantum-enhanced Machine Learning (ML) for wireless scheduling.
This work investigates an extension of transfer learning applied in machine learning algorithms to the emerging hybrid end-to-end quantum neural network (QNN) for spoken command recognition (SCR). Our QNN-based SCR system is composed of classical and quantum components: (1) the classical part mainly relies on a 1D convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract speech features; (2) the quantum part is built upon the variational quantum circuit with a few learnable parameters. Since it is inefficient to train the hybrid end-to-end QNN from scratch on a noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) device, we put forth a hybrid transfer learning algorithm that allows a pre-trained classical network to be transferred to the classical part of the hybrid QNN model. The pre-trained classical network is further modified and augmented through jointly fine-tuning with a variational quantum circuit (VQC). The hybrid transfer learning methodology is particularly attractive for the task of QNN-based SCR because low-dimensional classical features are expected to be encoded into quantum states. We assess the hybrid transfer learning algorithm applied to the hybrid classical-quantum QNN for SCR on the Google speech command dataset, and our classical simulation results suggest that the hybrid transfer learning can boost our baseline performance on the SCR task.