This study presents an investigation of the Dual Discriminator Hybrid Quantum Generative Adversarial Network (DDHQ-GAN), a framework designed to enhance the performance of conventional Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) through the incorporation of a hybrid quantum discriminator. The proposed DDHQ-GAN architecture comprises three primary components: a generator and two discriminators. The research evaluates the efficacy of the DDHQ-GAN in comparison with existing GAN variants, employing the Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) as a quantitative metric to assess image generation quality. The study further examines the interplay between the structural configurations of parameterized quantum circuits, classical neural network architectures, and model hyperparameters, using the MNIST dataset as the experimental benchmark. Empirical results demonstrate that the DDHQ-GAN achieves superior performance, reflected by lower FID scores, while incurring only a marginal increase in the number of parameters and quantum computational resources.
This study presents an investigation of the Dual Discriminator Hybrid Quantum Generative Adversarial Network (DDHQ-GAN), a framework designed to enhance the performance of conventional Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) through the incorporation of a hybrid quantum discriminator. The proposed DDHQ-GAN architecture comprises three primary components: a generator and two discriminators. The research evaluates the efficacy of the DDHQ-GAN in comparison with existing GAN variants, employing the Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) as a quantitative metric to assess image generation quality. The study further examines the interplay between the structural configurations of parameterized quantum circuits, classical neural network architectures, and model hyperparameters, using the MNIST dataset as the experimental benchmark. Empirical results demonstrate that the DDHQ-GAN achieves superior performance, reflected by lower FID scores, while incurring only a marginal increase in the number of parameters and quantum computational resources.
Abstract As a crucial component in quantum machine learning, quantum generative adversarial networks play a significant role in generating discrete distributions. However, due to issues such as the vanishing gradient and mode collapse, the results generated by quantum generative adversarial models are of suboptimal quality sometimes. Given the robust image feature extraction capabilities of quantum convolutional neural networks, a hybrid quantum convolutional neural network model is incorporated into the quantum generative adversarial network as a discriminator. Different from the traditional multi‐layer linear structure, this discriminator adopts a parallel structure. This parallel structure can analyze both the local and the global features of an image simultaneously. It can promptly detect the defects in the global distribution of generated data, prompting the generator to explore more data patterns and avoid falling into mode collapse. The feasibility of this solution is verified through generation experiments on the handwritten dataset, Fashion‐MNIST dataset, and CIFAR‐100 dataset. The experimental results show that the FID (Fréchet Inception Distance) scores of the generated results on these three datasets reach 14, 20, and 17 respectively, fully demonstrating the performance of this image generation algorithm.
Abstract Quantum generative adversarial networks (QGANs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in tasks like synthetic data generation and detecting anomalies. Recent developments have increasingly integrated traditional machine learning techniques to boost the performance of QGANs. Motivated by this progress, we propose an innovative QGAN architecture that incorporates a classical learning component and employs a dual-generator design. Our approach improves upon the traditional hybrid quantum–classical GAN structure and introduces a redesigned loss function tailored for the new model. Experiments on multiple datasets indicate that our method surpasses previous techniques in image generation quality, achieving a 1.38% average reduction in Fréchet inception distance scores compared to the current state-of-the-art, and improvements of 6.52%, 0.36%, and 0.38% in structural similarity index, cosine similarity, and peak signal-to-noise ratio metrics, respectively. Additionally, our architecture supports the generation of larger images (up to 78 × 78 ), as verified on the CelebA dataset. Simulations conducted in noisy conditions further confirm the robustness and effectiveness of both the proposed architecture and loss function.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have demonstrated immense potential in synthesizing diverse and high-fidelity images; however, critical questions remain regarding how quantum principles might best enhance their representational capacity. This thesis investigates hybrid quantum-classical GAN architectures supplemented by transfer learning in the discriminator, systematically examining whether incorporating Variational Quantum Circuits (VQCs) into the generator, the discriminator, or both improves performance over fully classical baselines. We evaluate each configuration using standard GAN benchmarks (CIFAR-10 classes: Birds, Cars, and Dogs) under varying sample sizes (5,000 vs. 2,500 images per class) to gauge both robustness and data efficiency. Our findings indicate that fully hybrid models, which incorporate VQCs in both the generator and the discriminator, consistently produce images of higher visual quality and achieve more favorable quantitative metrics (such as Fréchet Inception Distance (FID), Kernel Inception Distance (KID), and Inception Score (IS)) compared to their fully classical counterpart. In particular, VQCs in the generator accelerate early feature learning, whereas those in the discriminator, despite exhibiting slower initial convergence, ultimately facilitate more refined synthetic outputs. Moreover, the model sustains near-comparable performance even when the dataset size is halved, suggesting that transfer learning and quantum enhancements mitigate data limitations. By comparing classical and hybrid configurations in detail, this thesis illustrates the trade-offs arising from VQCs in GANs, such as variations in early-epoch convergence and final generative quality. Overall, the results underscore that carefully integrating quantum computing principles with classical adversarial training and pretrained feature extraction can significantly enrich GAN-based image synthesis. These insights open avenues for future work on higher-resolution tasks, alternative quantum circuit designs, and experimentation with emerging quantum hardware.
Quantum Generative Adversarial Networks (QGANs), as a rising paradigm in Quantum Machine Learning, have shown promising potential in image generation and processing. However, their output quality remains suboptimal, and existing research is largely limited to small-scale, proof-of-concept studies. In this work, we propose a hybrid quantum-classical GAN architecture, where the generator integrates parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) and classical neural networks. This integration significantly enhances the visual quality of generated images. Our model leverages the complementary strengths of quantum and classical components and outperforms existing methods (Tsang et al. in IEEE Trans. Quantum Eng. 4:1–19, 2023 ; Gulrajani et al. in Proceedings of the 31st international conference on neural information processing systems. NIPS’17, Red Hook, pp. 5769–5779, 2017 ), particularly in terms of image fidelity. Experiments conducted on the MNIST family of datasets show that our hybrid approach achieves a 20.26% average reduction in Fréchet Inception Distance. Furthermore, it improves the Structural Similarity Index Measure, Cosine Similarity, and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio by 26.04%, 2.22%, and 7.62%, respectively. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining quantum computing with machine learning, and underscore the potential of hybrid quantum-classical models in advancing generative tasks.
Generative adversarial network (GAN) is one of the widely-adopted machine-learning frameworks for a wide range of applications such as generating high-quality images, video, and audio contents. However, training a GAN could become computationally expensive for large neural networks. In this work, we propose a hybrid quantum-classical architecture for improving GAN (denoted as QC-GAN). The performance was examed numerically by benchmarking with a classical GAN using MindSpore Quantum on the task of hand-written image generation. The generator of the QC-GAN consists of a quantum variational circuit together with a one-layer neural network, and the discriminator consists of a traditional neural network. Leveraging the entangling and expressive power of quantum circuits, our hybrid architecture achieved better performance (Frechet Inception Distance) than the classical GAN, with much fewer training parameters and number of iterations for convergence. We have also demonstrated the superiority of QC-GAN over an alternative quantum GAN, namely pathGAN, which could hardly generate 16$\times$16 or larger images. This work demonstrates the value of combining ideas from quantum computing with machine learning for both areas of Quantum-for-AI and AI-for-Quantum.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have demonstrated immense potential in synthesizing diverse and high-fidelity images. However, critical questions remain unanswered regarding how quantum principles might best enhance their representational and computational capacity. In this paper, we investigate hybrid quantum-classical GAN architectures supplemented by transfer learning to systematically examine whether incorporating Variational Quantum Circuits (VQCs) into the generator, the discriminator, or both improves performance over a fully classical baseline. Our findings indicate that fully hybrid models, which incorporate VQCs in both the generator and the discriminator, produce images with higher quality and achieve more favorable quantitative metrics compared to their fully classical counterparts. In particular, placing the quantum block in the generator appears to accelerate the early emergence of visual structure, whereas placing it in the discriminator slows early visual convergence but improves the final quantitative quality metric. Incorporating quantum blocks into both networks yields the strongest overall performance. Moreover, the model sustains comparable performance even when the dataset size is reduced. Overall, the results underscore that carefully integrating quantum computing with classical adversarial training and pretrained feature extraction can enrich GAN-based image synthesis. These insights open avenues for future work on higher-resolution tasks, alternative quantum circuit designs, and experimentation with emerging quantum hardware.