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The power of quantum neural networks

Amira Abbas, David Sutter, Christa Zoufal, Aurélien Lucchi, Alessio Figalli, Stefan Woerner

30/10/20 Published in : arXiv:2011.00027

Fault-tolerant quantum computers offer the promise of dramatically improving machine learning through speed-ups in computation or improved model scalability. In the near-term, however, the benefits of quantum machine learning are not so clear. Understanding expressibility and trainability of quantum models-and quantum neural networks in particular-requires further investigation. In this work, we use tools from information geometry to define a notion of expressibility for quantum and classical models. The effective dimension, which depends on the Fisher information, is used to prove a novel generalisation bound and establish a robust measure of expressibility. We show that quantum neural networks are able to achieve a significantly better effective dimension than comparable classical neural networks. To then assess the trainability of quantum models, we connect the Fisher information spectrum to barren plateaus, the problem of vanishing gradients. Importantly, certain quantum neural networks can show resilience to this phenomenon and train faster than classical models due to their favourable optimisation landscapes, captured by a more evenly spread Fisher information spectrum. Our work is the first to demonstrate that well-designed quantum neural networks offer an advantage over classical neural networks through a higher effective dimension and faster training ability, which we verify on real quantum hardware.

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Phase I & II research project(s)

  • Statistical Mechanics

Quantum groups for restricted SOS models

Indeterminism in Physics and Intuitionistic Mathematics

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  • Co-leading house


The National Centres of Competence in Research (NCCRs) are a funding scheme of the Swiss National Science Foundation

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