HQViT: Hybrid Quantum Vision Transformer for Image Classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Hui, Zhao, Qinglin, Zhou, Mengchu, Feng, Li
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Hui
Zhao, Qinglin
Zhou, Mengchu
Feng, Li
author_facet Zhang, Hui
Zhao, Qinglin
Zhou, Mengchu
Feng, Li
contents Transformer-based architectures have revolutionized the landscape of deep learning. In computer vision domain, Vision Transformer demonstrates remarkable performance on par with or even surpassing that of convolutional neural networks. However, the quadratic computational complexity of its self-attention mechanism poses challenges for classical computing, making model training with high-dimensional input data, e.g., images, particularly expensive. To address such limitations, we propose a Hybrid Quantum Vision Transformer (HQViT), that leverages the principles of quantum computing to accelerate model training while enhancing model performance. HQViT introduces whole-image processing with amplitude encoding to better preserve global image information without additional positional encoding. By leveraging quantum computation on the most critical steps and selectively handling other components in a classical way, we lower the cost of quantum resources for HQViT. The qubit requirement is minimized to $O(log_2N)$ and the number of parameterized quantum gates is only $O(log_2d)$, making it well-suited for Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum devices. By offloading the computationally intensive attention coefficient matrix calculation to the quantum framework, HQViT reduces the classical computational load by $O(T^2d)$. Extensive experiments across various computer vision datasets demonstrate that HQViT outperforms existing models, achieving a maximum improvement of up to $10.9\%$ (on the MNIST 10-classification task) over the state of the art. This work highlights the great potential to combine quantum and classical computing to cope with complex image classification tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_02730
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HQViT: Hybrid Quantum Vision Transformer for Image Classification
Zhang, Hui
Zhao, Qinglin
Zhou, Mengchu
Feng, Li
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Transformer-based architectures have revolutionized the landscape of deep learning. In computer vision domain, Vision Transformer demonstrates remarkable performance on par with or even surpassing that of convolutional neural networks. However, the quadratic computational complexity of its self-attention mechanism poses challenges for classical computing, making model training with high-dimensional input data, e.g., images, particularly expensive. To address such limitations, we propose a Hybrid Quantum Vision Transformer (HQViT), that leverages the principles of quantum computing to accelerate model training while enhancing model performance. HQViT introduces whole-image processing with amplitude encoding to better preserve global image information without additional positional encoding. By leveraging quantum computation on the most critical steps and selectively handling other components in a classical way, we lower the cost of quantum resources for HQViT. The qubit requirement is minimized to $O(log_2N)$ and the number of parameterized quantum gates is only $O(log_2d)$, making it well-suited for Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum devices. By offloading the computationally intensive attention coefficient matrix calculation to the quantum framework, HQViT reduces the classical computational load by $O(T^2d)$. Extensive experiments across various computer vision datasets demonstrate that HQViT outperforms existing models, achieving a maximum improvement of up to $10.9\%$ (on the MNIST 10-classification task) over the state of the art. This work highlights the great potential to combine quantum and classical computing to cope with complex image classification tasks.
title HQViT: Hybrid Quantum Vision Transformer for Image Classification
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.02730