The expressivity and scalability of fixed feature embeddings and shallow quantum circuits for Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVMs) are restricted due to the limitations of near-term hardware. In this work, we propose a novel QSVM framework consisting of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA)-modified VisionTransformer embeddings as well as trainable variational quantum circuits. The architecture enhances the representational power by the joint optimization of embedding and circuit parameters. Empirical evaluation on distilled benchmark datasets shows significant performance gains, with up to 38.7% absolute accuracy improvement on MNIST (61.3% to 100.0%). The model also achieves 91% to 100% test accuracies on Fashion-MNIST, KMNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets with only 200 training samples for each dataset. The results show that the performance improvements are due to the joint design between the feature embeddings and the quantum circuits, rather than just the quantum kernels. Cross-dataset evaluations and circuit-depth analyses provide experimental evidence that the approach is suitable for scalable quantum machine learning in image classification tasks.
The expressivity and scalability of fixed feature embeddings and shallow quantum circuits for Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVMs) are restricted due to the limitations of near-term hardware. In this work, we propose a novel QSVM framework consisting of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA)-modified VisionTransformer embeddings as well as trainable variational quantum circuits. The architecture enhances the representational power by the joint optimization of embedding and circuit parameters. Empirical evaluation on distilled benchmark datasets shows significant performance gains, with up to 38.7% absolute accuracy improvement on MNIST (61.3% to 100.0%). The model also achieves 91% to 100% test accuracies on Fashion-MNIST, KMNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets with only 200 training samples for each dataset. The results show that the performance improvements are due to the joint design between the feature embeddings and the quantum circuits, rather than just the quantum kernels. Cross-dataset evaluations and circuit-depth analyses provide experimental evidence that the approach is suitable for scalable quantum machine learning in image classification tasks.
In order to leverage quantum computers for machine learning tasks such as image classification, careful consideration is required: NISQ-era quantum computers have limitations, which include noise, scalability, read-in and read-out times, and gate operation times. Therefore, strategies should be devised to mitigate the impact that complex datasets can have on the overall efficiency of a quantum machine learning pipeline. This may otherwise lead to excessive resource demands or increased noise. We apply a classical feature extraction method using a ResNet10-inspired convolutional autoencoder to both reduce the dimensionality of the dataset and extract abstract and meaningful features before feeding them into a quantum machine learning block. The quantum block of choice is a quantum-enhanced support vector machine (QSVM), as support vector machines typically do not require large sample sizes to identify patterns in data and have short-depth quantum circuits, which limits the impact of noise. The autoencoder is trained to extract meaningful features through image reconstruction, aiming to minimize the mean squared error across a training set. Three image datasets are used to illustrate the pipeline: HTRU-1, MNIST, and CIFAR-10. We also include a quantum-enhanced one-class support vector machine (QOCSVM) for the highly unbalanced HTRU-1 set, as well as classical machine learning results to serve as a benchmark. Finally, the HTRU-2 dataset is also included to serve as a benchmark for a dataset with well-correlated features. The autoencoder achieved near-perfect reconstruction and high classification accuracy for MNIST, while CIFAR-10 showed poorer performance due to image complexity, and HTRU-1 struggled because of dataset imbalance. This highlights the need for a balance between dimensionality reduction through classical feature extraction and prediction performance using quantum methods.
In order to leverage quantum computers for machine learning tasks such as image classification, consideration is required. Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers have limitations that include noise, scalability, read-in and read-out times, and gate operation times. Therefore, strategies should be devised to mitigate the impact complex datasets that can have on the overall efficiency of a quantum machine learning pipeline. This may otherwise lead to excessive resource demands or noise. We apply a classical feature extraction using a ResNet10-inspired convolutional autoencoder to reduce dataset dimensionality and extract abstract, meaningful features before feeding them into a quantum layer. The chosen quantum layer is a quantum-enhanced support vector machine (QSVM), as SVMs typically do not require large sample sizes to identify patterns in data and have short-depth quantum circuits, which limits the impact of noise. The autoencoder is trained to extract meaningful features through image reconstruction, aiming to minimize the mean squared error across a training set of images. We use three datasets to illustrate the pipeline: HTRU-1, MNIST, and CIFAR-10. We include a quantum-enhanced one-class support vector machine (QOCSVM) for the highly unbalanced HTRU-1 set, with classical machine learning results for comparison. HTRU-2 is also included to serve as a benchmark for a dataset with meaningful features. The autoencoder achieved near-perfect reconstruction and high accuracy for MNIST, while CIFAR-10 showed poorer performance due to image complexity, and HTRU-1 struggled due to the imbalance in the dataset. The varying performance across datasets highlights the need to balance dimensionality reduction and prediction performance using quantum methods.
Quantum Support Vector Machines face scalability challenges due to high-dimensional quantum states and hardware limitations. We propose an embedding-aware quantum-classical pipeline combining class-balanced k-means distillation with pretrained Vision Transformer embeddings. Our key finding: ViT embeddings uniquely enable quantum advantage, achieving up to 8.02% accuracy improvements over classical SVMs on Fashion-MNIST and 4.42% on MNIST, while CNN features show performance degradation. Using 16-qubit tensor network simulation via cuTensorNet, we provide the first systematic evidence that quantum kernel advantage depends critically on embedding choice, revealing fundamental synergy between transformer attention and quantum feature spaces. This provides a practical pathway for scalable quantum machine learning that leverages modern neural architectures.
Quantum Machine Learning (QML) provides a pathway for analysing nonlinear relationships through quantum- enhanced feature spaces. Although quantum models are theoreti- cally well suited for high-complexity data, current hardware and simulator limitations restrict their use to small datasets. For this reason, the original large Web Phishing Detection Dataset was reduced to 200 representative samples through dimensionality reduction, allowing controlled experimentation and enabling evaluation of quantum behaviour with manageable computational cost. QML research commonly follows this approach, testing algorithms on small datasets first, because quantum feature maps can generate exponentially expressive Hilbert-space embeddings even from limited inputs. In this study, multiple Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) models were implemented using fidelity-based quantum kernels and Pauli feature maps. Models with 2 to 10 qubits were evaluated to observe how circuit width affects performance. The two-qubit QSVM achieved the best quantum result with 72 % accuracy, whereas deeper circuits showed declining performance, indicating overfitting and reduced generalization on limited data. In contrast, the classical SVM attained 97 % accuracy with significantly lower computational effort. These findings highlight the challenges and potential of QML for cybersecurity tasks. Future work will explore circuit- expressivity tuning, optimized quantum kernels, hybrid quantum- classical approaches, and scalability to larger phishing datasets as quantum hardware evolves.
Abstract Support vector machines (SVMs) are widely used for classification, but become computationally expensive as datasets grow and data become high-dimensional or nonlinearly separable. Quantum support vector machines (QSVMs) enhance the traditional SVMs by replacing conventional feature mappings with quantum-implemented embeddings that project data into high-dimensional Hilbert spaces, potentially improving expressive power and efficiency. However, training QSVMs on current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices remains challenging, as constructing the quantum kernel matrix requires repeated circuit executions and scales quadratically with dataset size. We propose NQ-SVM , a hybrid quantum-classical method that incorporates the Nystr\"om approximation to enhance the scalability of QSVMs. By selecting a small set of landmark points, the Nystr\"om method yields a low-rank kernel approximation, reducing complexity from (O(n2)) to (O(nm)), while preserving the quantum advantages in handling high-dimensional, non-linear data. Extensive simulations demonstrate that NQ-SVM achieves comparable classification accuracy to classical SVMs and full QSVMs, while substantially reducing training time and kernel evaluation costs. These results underscore the potential of NQ-SVM as a scalable and practical hybrid framework for near-term quantum machine learning (QML).
Abstract Quantum machine learning is a rapidly growing field at the intersection of quantum computing and machine learning. In this work, we examine our quantum machine learning models, which are based on quantum support vector classification (QSVC) and quantum support vector regression (QSVR). We investigate these models using a quantum-circuit simulator, both with and without noise, as well as the IonQ Harmony quantum processor. For the QSVC tasks, we use a dataset containing fraudulent credit card transactions and image datasets (the MNIST and the Fashion-MNIST datasets); for the QSVR tasks, we use a financial dataset and a materials dataset. For the classification tasks, the performance of our QSVC models using 4 qubits of the trapped-ion quantum computer was comparable to that obtained from noiseless quantum-circuit simulations. The result is consistent with the analysis of our device-noise simulations with varying qubit-gate error rates. For the regression tasks, applying a low-rank approximation to the noisy quantum kernel, in combination with hyperparameter tuning in ε-SVR, improved the performance of the QSVR models on the near-term quantum device. Our results suggest that the quantum kernel, as described by our shallow quantum circuit, can be effectively used for both QSVC and QSVR tasks, indicating its resistance to noise and its adaptability to various datasets.