Does provable absence of barren plateaus imply classical simulability?

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Cerezo, M., Larocca, Martin, García-Martín, Diego, Diaz, N. L., Braccia, Paolo, Fontana, Enrico, Rudolph, Manuel S., Bermejo, Pablo, Ijaz, Aroosa, Thanasilp, Supanut, Anschuetz, Eric R., Holmes, Zoë
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866909751858692096
author Cerezo, M.
Larocca, Martin
García-Martín, Diego
Diaz, N. L.
Braccia, Paolo
Fontana, Enrico
Rudolph, Manuel S.
Bermejo, Pablo
Ijaz, Aroosa
Thanasilp, Supanut
Anschuetz, Eric R.
Holmes, Zoë
author_facet Cerezo, M.
Larocca, Martin
García-Martín, Diego
Diaz, N. L.
Braccia, Paolo
Fontana, Enrico
Rudolph, Manuel S.
Bermejo, Pablo
Ijaz, Aroosa
Thanasilp, Supanut
Anschuetz, Eric R.
Holmes, Zoë
contents A large amount of effort has recently been put into understanding the barren plateau phenomenon. In this perspective article, we face the increasingly loud elephant in the room and ask a question that has been hinted at by many but not explicitly addressed: Can the structure that allows one to avoid barren plateaus also be leveraged to efficiently simulate the loss classically? We collect evidence-on a case-by-case basis-that many commonly used models whose loss landscapes avoid barren plateaus can also admit classical simulation, provided that one can collect some classical data from quantum devices during an initial data acquisition phase. This follows from the observation that barren plateaus result from a curse of dimensionality, and that current approaches for solving them end up encoding the problem into some small, classically simulable, subspaces. Thus, while stressing that quantum computers can be essential for collecting data, our analysis sheds doubt on the information processing capabilities of many parametrized quantum circuits with provably barren plateau-free landscapes. We end by discussing the (many) caveats in our arguments including the limitations of average case arguments, the role of smart initializations, models that fall outside our assumptions, the potential for provably superpolynomial advantages and the possibility that, once larger devices become available, parametrized quantum circuits could heuristically outperform our analytic expectations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_09121
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Does provable absence of barren plateaus imply classical simulability?
Cerezo, M.
Larocca, Martin
García-Martín, Diego
Diaz, N. L.
Braccia, Paolo
Fontana, Enrico
Rudolph, Manuel S.
Bermejo, Pablo
Ijaz, Aroosa
Thanasilp, Supanut
Anschuetz, Eric R.
Holmes, Zoë
Quantum Physics
Machine Learning
A large amount of effort has recently been put into understanding the barren plateau phenomenon. In this perspective article, we face the increasingly loud elephant in the room and ask a question that has been hinted at by many but not explicitly addressed: Can the structure that allows one to avoid barren plateaus also be leveraged to efficiently simulate the loss classically? We collect evidence-on a case-by-case basis-that many commonly used models whose loss landscapes avoid barren plateaus can also admit classical simulation, provided that one can collect some classical data from quantum devices during an initial data acquisition phase. This follows from the observation that barren plateaus result from a curse of dimensionality, and that current approaches for solving them end up encoding the problem into some small, classically simulable, subspaces. Thus, while stressing that quantum computers can be essential for collecting data, our analysis sheds doubt on the information processing capabilities of many parametrized quantum circuits with provably barren plateau-free landscapes. We end by discussing the (many) caveats in our arguments including the limitations of average case arguments, the role of smart initializations, models that fall outside our assumptions, the potential for provably superpolynomial advantages and the possibility that, once larger devices become available, parametrized quantum circuits could heuristically outperform our analytic expectations.
title Does provable absence of barren plateaus imply classical simulability?
topic Quantum Physics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09121