Learning photonic quantum states

Yong Wang, Zhenghao Yin, Tobias Haug +6 more

Abstract Photons are promising candidates for quantum information technology due to their high robustness and long coherence time at room temperature. Inspired by recent advances in photonic computing techniques, research has increasingly turned to quantum machine learning (QML) on photonic platforms. Although photons provide a high-dimensional quantum feature space suitable for computation, a general understanding of how photon number can be harnessed for learning tasks remains limited. Here, we establish both theoretically and experimentally a learning-capacity advantage of multi-photon states over single-photon states in photonic QML. We prove that the learning capacity of linear optical circuits, quantified by the rank of the data quantum Fisher information matrix, scales polynomially with the photon number. This scaling enables multi-photon models to generalize from fewer training states than corresponding single-photon models and to achieve lower test loss under the same architecture and learning protocol. Moreover, we experimentally corroborate these findings through unitary learning and metric learning tasks, by performing online training on a fully programmable photonic integrated platform. Our work highlights the potential of photonic QML and paves the way for achieving quantum enhancement in practical machine learning applications.

Virginia O. Lorenz

Hugo Thomas, Ulysse Chabaud, Pierre-Emmanuel Emeriau

Learning quantum state properties is both a fundamental and practical problem in quantum information theory. Classical shadows have emerged as an efficient method for estimating properties of unknown quantum states, with rigorous statistical guarantees, by performing randomized measurement on few copies of the state. With the advent of photonic technologies, formulating efficient learning algorithms for such platforms comes out as a natural problem. Here, we introduce a practical classical shadow protocol for learning photonic quantum states via randomized passive linear optical transformations and photon-number measurement. We provide rigorous theoretical guarantees showing that our scheme is sample- and time-efficient for measuring physical observables of interest. We experimentally demonstrate our photonic classical shadow protocol on both a twelve-mode and a twenty-four-mode integrated quantum processing unit, and showcase its versatility with five different applications, including Hamiltonian measurement and learning complex photonic states.

Yong Wang, Zhenghao Yin, Tobias Haug +6 more

Photons are promising candidates for quantum information technology due to their high robustness and long coherence time at room temperature. Inspired by the prosperous development of photonic computing techniques, recent research has turned attention to performing quantum machine learning on photonic platforms. Although photons possess a high-dimensional quantum feature space suitable for computation, a general understanding of how to harness it for learning tasks remains blank. Here, we establish both theoretically and experimentally a scalable advantage in quantum machine learning with multi-photon states. Firstly, we prove that the learning capacity of linear optical circuits scales polynomially with the photon number, enabling generalization from smaller training datasets and yielding lower test loss values. Moreover, we experimentally corroborate these findings through unitary learning and metric learning tasks, by performing online training on a fully programmable photonic integrated platform. Our work highlights the potential of photonic quantum machine learning and paves the way for achieving quantum enhancement in practical machine learning applications.

Klaus M. Gheri, Päivi Törmä, P. Zoller

Thomas P. Pearsall