International Forum on Electrical Engineering and Automation (IFEEA)
Quantum neural network based on self-attention mechanism optimized by quantum annealing Time series forecasting of power load
Baonan Wang, Youdian Fan
Abstract
Accurate power load forecasting is vital for reliable grid operation and energy management. We propose QRNN-QA-MSSA, which builds a Quantum Recurrent Neural Network (QRNN) via Automatic Differentiation Quantum Circuits (ADQC), applies quantum annealing (QA) for global optimization, and integrates multi-scale self-attention (MSSA) to capture short-and long-term dependencies. Evaluated on four seasonal datasets against RNN, LSTM, QRNN, QRNN-QA, and QRNN-QA-SA, the proposed model achieves average RMSE = 0.017 and MAPE = 3.28%, improving over QRNN-QA by about 20.8% and 18.0%, and reducing errors by >40% compared with classical RNN and LSTM. It also converges faster with smoother error curves. The average R2reaches 99.49%, and the model maintains high accuracy under pronounced peak–valley load intervals. These results indicate that coupling quantum annealing with multi-scale attention is an effective route to optimizing quantum neural networks for complex seasonal time-series forecasting.