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IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics

Quantum Few-Shot Image Classification

Zhihao Huang, Jinjing Shi, Xuelong Li

Published Oct 25, 2024• 9 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Few-shot learning algorithms frequently exhibit suboptimal performance due to the limited availability of labeled data. This article presents a novel quantum few-shot image classification methodology aimed at enhancing the efficacy of few-shot learning algorithms at both the data and parameter levels. Initially, a quantum augmentation image representation technique is introduced, leveraging the local phase of quantum states to support few-shot learning algorithms at the data level. This approach enriches classical data while maintaining its intrinsic physical properties. Subsequently, a parameterized quantum circuit is employed to construct the classification model. This circuit, characterized by a reduced number of trainable parameters, shows increased resilience to overfitting, thereby offering a significant advantage at the parameter level for few-shot learning algorithms. The proposed approach is validated using three datasets, with experimental results indicating that it outperforms classical methods in few-shot learning scenarios while requiring fewer computational resources.

DOI
10.1109/tcyb.2024.3476339

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Few-shot learning algorithms frequently exhibit suboptimal performance due to the limited availability of labeled data. This article presents a novel quantum few-shot image classification methodology aimed at enhancing the efficacy of few-shot learning algorithms at both the data and parameter levels. Initially, a quantum augmentation image representation technique is introduced, leveraging the local phase of quantum states to support few-shot learning algorithms at the data level. This approach enriches classical data while maintaining its intrinsic physical properties. Subsequently, a parameterized quantum circuit is employed to construct the classification model. This circuit, characterized by a reduced number of trainable parameters, shows increased resilience to overfitting, thereby offering a significant advantage at the parameter level for few-shot learning algorithms. The proposed approach is validated using three datasets, with experimental results indicating that it outperforms classical methods in few-shot learning scenarios while requiring fewer computational resources.
Image classification is a crucial task in machine learning with widespread practical applications. The existing classical framework for image classification typically utilizes a global pooling operation at the end of the network to reduce computational complexity and mitigate overfitting. However, this operation often results in a significant loss of information, which can affect the performance of classification models. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel image classification framework that leverages variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) hybrid approaches combining quantum and classical computing paradigms within quantum machine learning. The major advantage of our framework is the elimination of the need for the global pooling operation at the end of the network. In this way, our approach preserves more discriminative features and fine-grained details in the images, which enhances classification performance. Additionally, employing VQAs enables our framework to have fewer parameters than the classical framework, even in the absence of global pooling, which makes it more advantageous in preventing overfitting. We apply our method to different state-of-the-art image classification models and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed quantum architecture over its classical counterpart through a series of state vector simulation experiments on public datasets. Our experiments show that the proposed quantum framework achieves up to a 9.21% increase in accuracy and up to a 15.79% improvement in F1 score, compared to the classical framework. Additionally, we explore the impact of shot noise on our method through shot-based simulation and find that increasing the number of measurements does not always lead to better results. Selecting an appropriate number of measurements can yield optimal results, even surpassing those obtained from state vector simulation.
Abstract Image classification, a pivotal task in multiple industries, faces computational challenges due to the burgeoning volume of visual data. This research addresses these challenges by introducing two quantum machine learning models that leverage the principles of quantum mechanics for effective computations. Our first model, a hybrid quantum neural network with parallel quantum circuits, enables the execution of computations even in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum era, where circuits with a large number of qubits are currently infeasible. This model demonstrated a record-breaking classification accuracy of 99.21% on the full MNIST dataset, surpassing the performance of known quantum–classical models, while having eight times fewer parameters than its classical counterpart. Also, the results of testing this hybrid model on a Medical MNIST (classification accuracy over 99%), and on CIFAR-10 (classification accuracy over 82%), can serve as evidence of the generalizability of the model and highlights the efficiency of quantum layers in distinguishing common features of input data. Our second model introduces a hybrid quantum neural network with a Quanvolutional layer, reducing image resolution via a convolution process. The model matches the performance of its classical counterpart, having four times fewer trainable parameters, and outperforms a classical model with equal weight parameters. These models represent advancements in quantum machine learning research and illuminate the path towards more accurate image classification systems.
Quantum machine learning, as an extension of classical machine learning that harnesses quantum mechanics, facilitates effiient learning from data encoded in quantum states. Training a quantum neural network typically demands a substantial labeled training set for supervised learning. Human annotators, often experts, provide labels for samples through additional experiments, adding to the training cost. To mitigate this expense, there is a quest for methods that maintain model performance over fully labeled datasets while requiring fewer labeled samples in practice, thereby extending few-shot learning to the quantum realm. Quantum active learning estimates the uncertainty of quantum data to select the most informative samples from a pool for labeling. Consequently, a QML model is supposed to accumulate maximal knowledge as the training set comprises labeled samples selected via sampling strategies. Notably, the QML models trained within the QAL framework are not restricted to specific types, enabling performance enhancement from the model architecture's perspective towards few-shot learning. Recognizing symmetry as a fundamental concept in physics ubiquitous across various domains, we leverage the symmetry inherent in quantum states induced by the embedding of classical data for model design. We employ an equivariant QNN capable of generalizing from fewer data with geometric priors. We benchmark the performance of QAL on two classification problems, observing both positive and negative results. QAL effectively trains the model, achieving performance comparable to that on fully labeled datasets by labeling less than 7\% of the samples in the pool with unbiased sampling behavior. Furthermore, we elucidate the negative result of QAL being overtaken by random sampling baseline through miscellaneous numerical experiments. (character count limit, see the main text)
Modern quantum machine learning (QML) methods involve the variational optimization of parameterized quantum circuits on training datasets, followed by predictions on testing datasets. Most state-of-the-art QML algorithms currently lack practical advantages due to their limited learning capabilities, especially in few-shot learning tasks. In this work, we propose three new frameworks employing quantum diffusion model (QDM) as a solution for the few-shot learning: label-guided generation inference (LGGI); label-guided denoising inference (LGDI); and label-guided noise addition inference (LGNAI). Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms significantly outperform existing methods.
Modern quantum machine learning (QML) methods involve the variational optimization of parameterized quantum circuits on training datasets, followed by predictions on testing datasets. Most state-of-the-art QML algorithms currently lack practical advantages due to their limited learning capabilities, especially in few-shot learning tasks. In this work, we propose three new frameworks employing quantum diffusion model (QDM) as a solution for the few-shot learning: label-guided generation inference (LGGI); label-guided denoising inference (LGDI); and label-guided noise addition inference (LGNAI). Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms significantly outperform existing methods.
A quantum neural network (QNN) is interpreted today as any quantum circuit with trainable continuous parameters. This work builds on previous works by the authors and addresses QNN for image classification with Novel Enhanced Quantum Representation of (NEQR) processed classical data where Principal component analysis (PCA) and Projected Quantum Kernel features (PQK) were investigated previously by the authors as a path to quantum advantage for the same classical dataset. For each of these cases the Fashion-MNIST dataset was downscaled using PCA to convert into quantum data where the classical NN easily outperformed the QNN. However, we demonstrated quantum advantage by using PQK where quantum models achieved more than ~90% accuracy surpassing their classical counterpart on the same training dataset as in the first case. In this current work, we use the same dataset fed into a QNN and compare that with performance of a classical NN model. We built an NEQR model circuit to pre-process the same data and feed the images into the QNN. Our results showed marginal improvements (only about ~5.0%) where the QNN performance with NEQR exceeded the performance of QNN without NEQR. We conclude that given the computational cost and the massive circuit depth associated with running NEQR, the advantage offered by this specific Quantum Image Processing (QIMP) algorithm is questionable at least for classical image dataset. No actual quantum computing hardware platform exists today that can support the circuit depth needed to run NEQR even for the reduced image sizes of our toy classical dataset.