Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bowles, Joseph, Wierichs, David, Park, Chae-Yeun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14962
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912632762531840
author Bowles, Joseph
Wierichs, David
Park, Chae-Yeun
author_facet Bowles, Joseph
Wierichs, David
Park, Chae-Yeun
contents The discovery of the backpropagation algorithm ranks among one of the most important moments in the history of machine learning, and has made possible the training of large-scale neural networks through its ability to compute gradients at roughly the same computational cost as model evaluation. Despite its importance, a similar backpropagation-like scaling for gradient evaluation of parameterised quantum circuits has remained elusive. Currently, the most popular method requires sampling from a number of circuits that scales with the number of circuit parameters, making training of large-scale quantum circuits prohibitively expensive in practice. Here we address this problem by introducing a class of structured circuits that are not known to be classically simulable and admit gradient estimation with significantly fewer circuits. In the simplest case -- for which the parameters feed into commuting quantum gates -- these circuits allow for fast estimation of the gradient, higher order partial derivatives and the Fisher information matrix. Moreover, specific families of parameterised circuits exist for which the scaling of gradient estimation is in line with classical backpropagation, and can thus be trained at scale. In a toy classification problem on 16 qubits, such circuits show competitive performance with other methods, while reducing the training cost by about two orders of magnitude.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_14962
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Backpropagation scaling in parameterised quantum circuits
Bowles, Joseph
Wierichs, David
Park, Chae-Yeun
Quantum Physics
The discovery of the backpropagation algorithm ranks among one of the most important moments in the history of machine learning, and has made possible the training of large-scale neural networks through its ability to compute gradients at roughly the same computational cost as model evaluation. Despite its importance, a similar backpropagation-like scaling for gradient evaluation of parameterised quantum circuits has remained elusive. Currently, the most popular method requires sampling from a number of circuits that scales with the number of circuit parameters, making training of large-scale quantum circuits prohibitively expensive in practice. Here we address this problem by introducing a class of structured circuits that are not known to be classically simulable and admit gradient estimation with significantly fewer circuits. In the simplest case -- for which the parameters feed into commuting quantum gates -- these circuits allow for fast estimation of the gradient, higher order partial derivatives and the Fisher information matrix. Moreover, specific families of parameterised circuits exist for which the scaling of gradient estimation is in line with classical backpropagation, and can thus be trained at scale. In a toy classification problem on 16 qubits, such circuits show competitive performance with other methods, while reducing the training cost by about two orders of magnitude.
title Backpropagation scaling in parameterised quantum circuits
topic Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14962