Noise, Errors, and Adversarial Robustness in Quantum Machine Learning

Nicola Franco, Aman Saxena, Tom Wollschläger +3 more

Pouya Kananian, Hans‐Arno Jacobsen

Maxwell T. West, Shu-Lok Tsang, Jia Shun Low +5 more

David Winderl, Nicola Franco, Jeanette Miriam Lorenz

Leveraging the unique properties of quantum mechanics, Quantum Machine Learning (QML) promises computational breakthroughs and enriched perspectives where traditional systems reach their boundaries. However, similarly to classical machine learning, QML is not immune to adversarial attacks. Quantum adversarial machine learning has become instrumental in highlighting the weak points of QML models when faced with adversarial crafted feature vectors. Diving deep into this domain, our exploration shines light on the interplay between depolarization noise and adversarial robustness. While previous results enhanced robustness from adversarial threats through depolarization noise, our findings paint a different picture. Interestingly, adding depolarization noise discontinued the effect of providing further robustness for a multi-class classification scenario. Consolidating our findings, we conducted experiments with a multi-class classifier adversarially trained on gate-based quantum simulators, further elucidating this unexpected behavior.

David Winderl, Nicola Franco, Jeanette Miriam Lorenz

Abstract Leveraging the unique properties of quantum mechanics, quantum machine learning (QML) promises computational breakthroughs and enriched perspectives where traditional systems reach their boundaries. However, similarly to classical machine learning, QML is not immune to adversarial attacks. Quantum adversarial machine learning has become instrumental in highlighting the weak points of QML models when faced with adversarial crafted feature vectors. Diving deep into this domain, our exploration shines a light on the interplay between depolarization noise and adversarial robustness. While previous results enhanced robustness from adversarial threats through depolarization noise, our findings paint a different picture. Interestingly, adding depolarization noise discontinued the effect of providing further robustness for a multi-class classification scenario. Consolidating our findings, we conducted experiments with a multi-class classifier adversarially trained on gate-based quantum simulators, further elucidating this unexpected behavior.

Lirandë Pira, Patrick Rebentrost

Quantum machine learning (QML) sits at the intersection of quantum computing and classical machine learning, offering the prospect of new computational paradigms and advantages for processing complex data. This chapter introduces the fundamentals of QML for readers from both communities, establishing a shared conceptual foundation. We connect the worst-case, adversarial perspective from theoretical computer science with the physical principles of quantum systems, highlighting how superposition, entanglement, and measurement collapse influence learning and robustness. Special attention is given to adversarial robustness, understood as the ability of QML models to resist inputs designed to cause failure. We motivate the study of QML in adversarial settings, outlining distinctions between classical and quantum data and computations when the adversary is a core element. This chapter serves as a starting point to adversarial and robust quantum machine learning in subsequent chapters.