Quantum sequel of neural network training

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Hao, Kamenev, Alex
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Hao
Kamenev, Alex
author_facet Zhang, Hao
Kamenev, Alex
contents Training of neural networks (NNs) has emerged as a major consumer of both computational and energy resources. Quantum computers were coined as a root to facilitate training, but no experimental evidence has been presented so far. Here we demonstrate that quantum annealing platforms, such as D-Wave, can enable fast and efficient training of classical NNs, which are then deployable on conventional hardware. From a physics perspective, NN training can be viewed as a dynamical phase transition: the system evolves from an initial spin glass state to a highly ordered, trained state. This process involves eliminating numerous undesired minima in its energy landscape. The advantage of annealing devices is their ability to rapidly find multiple deep states. We found that this quantum training achieves superior performance scaling compared to classical backpropagation methods, with a clearly higher scaling exponent (1.01 vs. 0.78). It may be further increased up to a factor of 2 with a fully coherent quantum platform using a variant of the Grover algorithm. Furthermore, we argue that even a modestly sized annealer can be beneficial to train a deep NN by being applied sequentially to a few layers at a time.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_05244
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Quantum sequel of neural network training
Zhang, Hao
Kamenev, Alex
Quantum Physics
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Training of neural networks (NNs) has emerged as a major consumer of both computational and energy resources. Quantum computers were coined as a root to facilitate training, but no experimental evidence has been presented so far. Here we demonstrate that quantum annealing platforms, such as D-Wave, can enable fast and efficient training of classical NNs, which are then deployable on conventional hardware. From a physics perspective, NN training can be viewed as a dynamical phase transition: the system evolves from an initial spin glass state to a highly ordered, trained state. This process involves eliminating numerous undesired minima in its energy landscape. The advantage of annealing devices is their ability to rapidly find multiple deep states. We found that this quantum training achieves superior performance scaling compared to classical backpropagation methods, with a clearly higher scaling exponent (1.01 vs. 0.78). It may be further increased up to a factor of 2 with a fully coherent quantum platform using a variant of the Grover algorithm. Furthermore, we argue that even a modestly sized annealer can be beneficial to train a deep NN by being applied sequentially to a few layers at a time.
title Quantum sequel of neural network training
topic Quantum Physics
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05244