Quantum machine learning explores the interplay between machine learning and quantum physics, which may lead to unprecedented perspectives for both fields. In fact, recent works have shown strong evidences that quantum computers could outperform classical computers in solving certain notable machine learning tasks. Yet, quantum learning systems may also suffer from the vulnerability problem: adding a tiny carefully-crafted perturbation to the legitimate input data would cause the systems to make incorrect predictions at a notably high confidence level. In this paper, we study the universality of adversarial examples and perturbations for quantum classifiers. Through concrete examples involving classifications of real-life images and quantum phases of matter, we show that there exist universal adversarial examples that can fool a set of different quantum classifiers. We prove that for a set of $k$ classifiers with each receiving input data of $n$ qubits, an $O(\frac{\ln k} {2^n})$ increase of the perturbation strength is enough to ensure a moderate universal adversarial risk. In addition, for a given quantum classifier we show that there exist universal adversarial perturbations, which can be added to different legitimate samples and make them to be adversarial examples for the classifier. Our results reveal the universality perspective of adversarial attacks for quantum machine learning systems, which would be crucial for practical applications of both near-term and future quantum technologies in solving machine learning problems.
We address the problem of facial expression recognition and show a possible solution using a quantum machine learning approach. In order to define an efficient classifier for a given dataset, our approach substantially exploits quantum interference. By representing face expressions via graphs, we define a classifier as a quantum circuit that manipulates the graphs adjacency matrices encoded into the amplitudes of some appropriately defined quantum states. We discuss the accuracy of the quantum classifier evaluated on the quantum simulator available on the IBM Quantum Experience cloud platform, and compare it with the accuracy of one of the best classical classifier.
We study supervised learning algorithms in which a quantum device is used to perform a computational subroutine - either for prediction via probability estimation, or to compute a kernel via estimation of quantum states overlap. We design implementations of these quantum subroutines using Boson Sampling architectures in linear optics, supplemented by adaptive measurements. We then challenge these quantum algorithms by deriving classical simulation algorithms for the tasks of output probability estimation and overlap estimation. We obtain different classical simulability regimes for these two computational tasks in terms of the number of adaptive measurements and input photons. In both cases, our results set explicit limits to the range of parameters for which a quantum advantage can be envisaged with adaptive linear optics compared to classical machine learning algorithms: we show that the number of input photons and the number of adaptive measurements cannot be simultaneously small compared to the number of modes. Interestingly, our analysis leaves open the possibility of a near-term quantum advantage with a single adaptive measurement.
Distributed quantum information processing is essential for building quantum networks and enabling more extensive quantum computations. In this regime, several spatially separated parties share a multipartite quantum system, and the most natural set of operations is Local Operations and Classical Communication (LOCC). As a pivotal part in quantum information theory and practice, LOCC has led to many vital protocols such as quantum teleportation. However, designing practical LOCC protocols is challenging due to LOCC's intractable structure and limitations set by near-term quantum devices. Here we introduce LOCCNet, a machine learning framework facilitating protocol design and optimization for distributed quantum information processing tasks. As applications, we explore various quantum information tasks such as entanglement distillation, quantum state discrimination, and quantum channel simulation. We discover protocols with evident improvements, in particular, for entanglement distillation with quantum states of interest in quantum information. Our approach opens up new opportunities for exploring entanglement and its applications with machine learning, which will potentially sharpen our understanding of the power and limitations of LOCC. An implementation of LOCCNet is available in Paddle Quantum, a quantum machine learning Python package based on PaddlePaddle deep learning platform.
With near-term quantum devices available and the race for fault-tolerant quantum computers in full swing, researchers became interested in the question of what happens if we replace a supervised machine learning model with a quantum circuit. While such "quantum models" are sometimes called "quantum neural networks", it has been repeatedly noted that their mathematical structure is actually much more closely related to kernel methods: they analyse data in high-dimensional Hilbert spaces to which we only have access through inner products revealed by measurements. This technical manuscript summarises and extends the idea of systematically rephrasing supervised quantum models as a kernel method. With this, a lot of near-term and fault-tolerant quantum models can be replaced by a general support vector machine whose kernel computes distances between data-encoding quantum states. Kernel-based training is then guaranteed to find better or equally good quantum models than variational circuit training. Overall, the kernel perspective of quantum machine learning tells us that the way that data is encoded into quantum states is the main ingredient that can potentially set quantum models apart from classical machine learning models.
This concept paper aims to provide a brief outline of quantum computers, explore existing methods of quantum image classification techniques, so focusing on remote sensing applications, and discuss the bottlenecks of performing these algorithms on currently available open source platforms. Initial results demonstrate feasibility. Next steps include expanding the size of the quantum hidden layer and increasing the variety of output image options.
Generative modeling using samples drawn from the probability distribution constitutes a powerful approach for unsupervised machine learning. Quantum mechanical systems can produce probability distributions that exhibit quantum correlations which are difficult to capture using classical models. We show theoretically that such quantum correlations provide a powerful resource for generative modeling. In particular, we provide an unconditional proof of separation in expressive power between a class of widely-used generative models, known as Bayesian networks, and its minimal quantum extension. We show that this expressivity advantage is associated with quantum nonlocality and quantum contextuality. Furthermore, we numerically test this separation on standard machine learning data sets and show that it holds for practical problems. The possibility of quantum advantage demonstrated in this work not only sheds light on the design of useful quantum machine learning protocols but also provides inspiration to draw on ideas from quantum foundations to improve purely classical algorithms.
The high energy physics (HEP) community has a long history of dealing with large-scale datasets. To manage such voluminous data, classical machine learning and deep learning techniques have been employed to accelerate physics discovery. Recent advances in quantum machine learning (QML) have indicated the potential of applying these techniques in HEP. However, there are only limited results in QML applications currently available. In particular, the challenge of processing sparse data, common in HEP datasets, has not been extensively studied in QML models. This research provides a hybrid quantum-classical graph convolutional network (QGCNN) for learning HEP data. The proposed framework demonstrates an advantage over classical multilayer perceptron and convolutional neural networks in the aspect of number of parameters. Moreover, in terms of testing accuracy, the QGCNN shows comparable performance to a quantum convolutional neural network on the same HEP dataset while requiring less than $50\%$ of the parameters. Based on numerical simulation results, studying the application of graph convolutional operations and other QML models may prove promising in advancing HEP research and other scientific fields.
We study the performance of classical and quantum machine learning (ML) models in predicting outcomes of physical experiments. The experiments depend on an input parameter $x$ and involve execution of a (possibly unknown) quantum process $\mathcal{E}$. Our figure of merit is the number of runs of $\mathcal{E}$ required to achieve a desired prediction performance. We consider classical ML models that perform a measurement and record the classical outcome after each run of $\mathcal{E}$, and quantum ML models that can access $\mathcal{E}$ coherently to acquire quantum data; the classical or quantum data is then used to predict outcomes of future experiments. We prove that for any input distribution $\mathcal{D}(x)$, a classical ML model can provide accurate predictions on average by accessing $\mathcal{E}$ a number of times comparable to the optimal quantum ML model. In contrast, for achieving accurate prediction on all inputs, we prove that exponential quantum advantage is possible. For example, to predict expectations of all Pauli observables in an $n$-qubit system $\rho$, classical ML models require $2^{\Omega(n)}$ copies of $\rho$, but we present a quantum ML model using only $\mathcal{O}(n)$ copies. Our results clarify where quantum advantage is possible and highlight the potential for classical ML models to address challenging quantum problems in physics and chemistry.
The term "machine learning" especially refers to algorithms that derive mappings, i.e. intput/output transforms, by using numerical data that provide information about considered transforms. These transforms appear in many problems, related to classification/clustering, regression, system identification, system inversion and input signal restoration/separation. We here first analyze the connections between all these problems, in the classical and quantum frameworks. We then focus on their most challenging versions, involving quantum data and/or quantum processing means, and unsupervised, i.e. blind, learning. Moreover, we propose the quite general concept of SIngle-Preparation Quantum Information Processing (SIPQIP). The resulting methods only require a single instance of each state, whereas usual methods have to very accurately create many copies of each fixed state. We apply our SIPQIP concept to various tasks, related to system identification (blind quantum process tomography or BQPT, blind Hamiltonian parameter estimation or BHPE, blind quantum channel identification/estimation, blind phase estimation), system inversion and state estimation (blind quantum source separation or BQSS, blind quantum entangled state restoration or BQSR, blind quantum channel equalization) and classification. Numerical tests show that our framework moreover yields much more accurate estimation than the standard multiple-preparation approach. Our methods are especially useful in a quantum computer, that we propose to more briefly call a "quamputer": BQPT and BHPE simplify the characterization of the gates of quamputers; BQSS and BQSR allow one to design quantum gates that may be used to compensate for the non-idealities that alter states stored in quantum registers, and they open the way to the much more general concept of self-adaptive quantum gates (see longer version of abstract in paper).
Tensor network, which originates from quantum physics, is emerging as an efficient tool for classical and quantum machine learning. Nevertheless, there still exists a considerable accuracy gap between tensor network and the sophisticated neural network models for classical machine learning. In this work, we combine the ideas of matrix product state (MPS), the simplest tensor network structure, and residual neural network and propose the residual matrix product state (ResMPS). The ResMPS can be treated as a network where its layers map the "hidden" features to the outputs (e.g., classifications), and the variational parameters of the layers are the functions of the features of the samples (e.g., pixels of images). This is different from neural network, where the layers map feed-forwardly the features to the output. The ResMPS can equip with the non-linear activations and dropout layers, and outperforms the state-of-the-art tensor network models in terms of efficiency, stability, and expression power. Besides, ResMPS is interpretable from the perspective of polynomial expansion, where the factorization and exponential machines naturally emerge. Our work contributes to connecting and hybridizing neural and tensor networks, which is crucial to further enhance our understand of the working mechanisms and improve the performance of both models.
This work presents a quantum convolutional neural network (QCNN) for the classification of high energy physics events. The proposed model is tested using a simulated dataset from the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. The proposed architecture demonstrates the quantum advantage of learning faster than the classical convolutional neural networks (CNNs) under a similar number of parameters. In addition to faster convergence, the QCNN achieves greater test accuracy compared to CNNs. Based on experimental results, it is a promising direction to study the application of QCNN and other quantum machine learning models in high energy physics and additional scientific fields.
Cryptanalysis on standard quantum cryptographic systems generally involves finding optimal adversarial attack strategies on the underlying protocols. The core principle of modelling quantum attacks in many cases reduces to the adversary's ability to clone unknown quantum states which facilitates the extraction of some meaningful secret information. Explicit optimal attack strategies typically require high computational resources due to large circuit depths or, in many cases, are unknown. In this work, we propose variational quantum cloning (VQC), a quantum machine learning based cryptanalysis algorithm which allows an adversary to obtain optimal (approximate) cloning strategies with short depth quantum circuits, trained using hybrid classical-quantum techniques. The algorithm contains operationally meaningful cost functions with theoretical guarantees, quantum circuit structure learning and gradient descent based optimisation. Our approach enables the end-to-end discovery of hardware efficient quantum circuits to clone specific families of quantum states, which in turn leads to an improvement in cloning fidelites when implemented on quantum hardware: the Rigetti Aspen chip. Finally, we connect these results to quantum cryptographic primitives, in particular quantum coin flipping. We derive attacks on two protocols as examples, based on quantum cloning and facilitated by VQC. As a result, our algorithm can improve near term attacks on these protocols, using approximate quantum cloning as a resource.
Classification of quantum data is essential for quantum machine learning and near-term quantum technologies. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid quantum-classical framework for supervised quantum learning, which we call Variational Shadow Quantum Learning (VSQL). Our method in particular utilizes the classical shadows of quantum data, which fundamentally represent the side information of quantum data with respect to certain physical observables. Specifically, we first use variational shadow quantum circuits to extract classical features in a convolution way and then utilize a fully-connected neural network to complete the classification task. We show that this method could sharply reduce the number of parameters and thus better facilitate quantum circuit training. Simultaneously, less noise will be introduced since fewer quantum gates are employed in such shadow circuits. Moreover, we show that the Barren Plateau issue, a significant gradient vanishing problem in quantum machine learning, could be avoided in VSQL. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency of VSQL in quantum classification via numerical experiments on the classification of quantum states and the recognition of multi-labeled handwritten digits. In particular, our VSQL approach outperforms existing variational quantum classifiers in the test accuracy in the binary case of handwritten digit recognition and notably requires much fewer parameters.
Quantum machine learning (QML) has emerged as an important area for Quantum applications, although useful QML applications would require many qubits. Therefore our paper is aimed at exploring the successful application of the Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) algorithm while balancing several practical and technical considerations under the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) assumption. For the quantum SVM under NISQ, we use quantum feature maps to translate data into quantum states and build the SVM kernel out of these quantum states, and further compare with classical SVM with radial basis function (RBF) kernels. As data sets are more complex or abstracted in some sense, classical SVM with classical kernels leads to less accuracy compared to QSVM, as classical SVM with typical classical kernels cannot easily separate different class data. Similarly, QSVM should be able to provide competitive performance over a broader range of data sets including ``simpler'' data cases in which smoother decision boundaries are required to avoid any model variance issues (i.e., overfitting). To bridge the gap between ``classical-looking'' decision boundaries and complex quantum decision boundaries, we propose to utilize general shallow unitary transformations to create feature maps with rotation factors to define a tunable quantum kernel, and added regularization to smooth the separating hyperplane model. We show in experiments that this allows QSVM to perform equally to SVM regardless of the complexity of the data sets and outperform in some commonly used reference data sets.
Quantum computers are expected to have substantial impact on the finance industry, as they will be able to solve certain problems considerably faster than the best known classical algorithms. In this article we describe such potential applications of quantum computing to finance, starting with the state-of-the-art and focusing in particular on recent works by the QC Ware team. We consider quantum speedups for Monte Carlo methods, portfolio optimization, and machine learning. For each application we describe the extent of quantum speedup possible and estimate the quantum resources required to achieve a practical speedup. The near-term relevance of these quantum finance algorithms varies widely across applications - some of them are heuristic algorithms designed to be amenable to near-term prototype quantum computers, while others are proven speedups which require larger-scale quantum computers to implement. We also describe powerful ways to bring these speedups closer to experimental feasibility - in particular describing lower depth algorithms for Monte Carlo methods and quantum machine learning, as well as quantum annealing heuristics for portfolio optimization. This article is targeted at financial professionals and no particular background in quantum computation is assumed.
The sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication network is expected to integrate the terrestrial, aerial, and maritime communications into a robust network which would be more reliable, fast, and can support a massive number of devices with ultra-low latency requirements. The researchers around the globe are proposing cutting edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML), quantum communication/quantum machine learning (QML), blockchain, tera-Hertz and millimeter waves communication, tactile Internet, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), small cells communication, fog/edge computing, etc., as the key technologies in the realization of beyond 5G (B5G) and 6G communications. In this article, we provide a detailed overview of the 6G network dimensions with air interface and associated potential technologies. More specifically, we highlight the use cases and applications of the proposed 6G networks in various dimensions. Furthermore, we also discuss the key performance indicators (KPI) for the B5G/6G network, challenges, and future research opportunities in this domain.
The Hodgkin-Huxley model describes the conduction of the nervous impulse through the axon, whose membrane's electric response can be described employing multiple connected electric circuits containing capacitors, voltage sources, and conductances. These conductances depend on previous depolarizing membrane voltages, which can be identified with a memory resistive element called memristor. Inspired by the recent quantization of the memristor, a simplified Hodgkin-Huxley model including a single ion channel has been studied in the quantum regime. Here, we study the quantization of the complete Hodgkin-Huxley model, accounting for all three ion channels, and introduce a quantum source, together with an output waveguide as the connection to a subsequent neuron. Our system consists of two memristors and one resistor, describing potassium, sodium, and chloride ion channel conductances, respectively, and a capacitor to account for the axon's membrane capacitance. We study the behavior of both ion channel conductivities and the circuit voltage, and we compare the results with those of the single channel, for a given quantum state of the source. It is remarkable that, in opposition to the single-channel model, we are able to reproduce the voltage spike in an adiabatic regime. Arguing that the circuit voltage is a quantum variable, we find a purely quantum-mechanical contribution in the system voltage's second moment. This work represents a complete study of the Hodgkin-Huxley model in the quantum regime, establishing a recipe for constructing quantum neuron networks with quantum state inputs. This paves the way for advances in hardware-based neuromorphic quantum computing, as well as quantum machine learning, which might be more efficient resource-wise.
A recommendation system uses the past purchases or ratings of $n$ products by a group of $m$ users, in order to provide personalized recommendations to individual users. The information is modeled as an $m \times n$ preference matrix which is assumed to have a good rank-$k$ approximation, for a small constant $k$. In this work, we present a quantum algorithm for recommendation systems that has running time $O(\text{poly}(k)\text{polylog}(mn))$. All known classical algorithms for recommendation systems that work through reconstructing an approximation of the preference matrix run in time polynomial in the matrix dimension. Our algorithm provides good recommendations by sampling efficiently from an approximation of the preference matrix, without reconstructing the entire matrix. For this, we design an efficient quantum procedure to project a given vector onto the row space of a given matrix. This is the first algorithm for recommendation systems that runs in time polylogarithmic in the dimensions of the matrix and provides an example of a quantum machine learning algorithm for a real world application.
One key step in performing quantum machine learning (QML) on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices is the dimension reduction of the input data prior to their encoding. Traditional principle component analysis (PCA) and neural networks have been used to perform this task; however, the classical and quantum layers are usually trained separately. A framework that allows for a better integration of the two key components is thus highly desirable. Here we introduce a hybrid model combining the quantum-inspired tensor networks (TN) and the variational quantum circuits (VQC) to perform supervised learning tasks, which allows for an end-to-end training. We show that a matrix product state based TN with low bond dimensions performs better than PCA as a feature extractor to compress data for the input of VQCs in the binary classification of MNIST dataset. The architecture is highly adaptable and can easily incorporate extra quantum resource when available.