Architecture Shape Governs QNN Trainability: Jacobian Null Space Growth and Parameter Efficiency

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Poppel, Michael, Bucher, David, Zorn, Maximilian, Baumann, Markus, Wölckert, Sebastian, Linnhoff-Popien, Claudia, Altmann, Philipp, Stein, Jonas
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Poppel, Michael
Bucher, David
Zorn, Maximilian
Baumann, Markus
Wölckert, Sebastian
Linnhoff-Popien, Claudia
Altmann, Philipp
Stein, Jonas
author_facet Poppel, Michael
Bucher, David
Zorn, Maximilian
Baumann, Markus
Wölckert, Sebastian
Linnhoff-Popien, Claudia
Altmann, Philipp
Stein, Jonas
contents Variational quantum circuits with angle encoding implement truncated Fourier series, and architectures arranging $N$ qubits with $L$ encoding layers each -- sharing encoding budget $E = NL$ -- generate identical frequency spectra, identical frequency redundancy, and require the same minimum parameter count for coefficient control. Despite this equivalence, trainability varies substantially with architecture shape $(N,L)$ at fixed $E$. We identify structural rank deficiency of the coefficient matching Jacobian $J$ as the mechanism responsible. For serial single-qubit architectures, we prove $\mathrm{rank}(J) \leq 2L+1$ regardless of parameter count $P$, with $\dim(\ker J) \geq P-(2L+1)$ growing without bound -- a phenomenon we term \emph{structural gradient starvation}: a growing fraction of parameters become structurally decoupled from the loss as $P$ increases at fixed $L$. Parallel architectures avoid this via independent phase trajectories, ensuring $σ_{\min}(J^{(\mathrm{par})}) > 0$ generically for $P \leq 2E+1$, so no parameter lies in $\ker J$. For practitioners, we further show that the two natural routes to increasing parameter count have fundamentally different effects: adding feature map (FM) layers monotonically strengthens the Jacobian QFIM eigenvalue spectrum and achieves $R^2 \geq 0.95$ with $1.6$--$2.2\times$ fewer parameters than adding trainable blocks across all tested architectures, while trainable blocks improve training only through the classical interpolation mechanism with no quantum-specific benefit.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_05942
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Architecture Shape Governs QNN Trainability: Jacobian Null Space Growth and Parameter Efficiency
Poppel, Michael
Bucher, David
Zorn, Maximilian
Baumann, Markus
Wölckert, Sebastian
Linnhoff-Popien, Claudia
Altmann, Philipp
Stein, Jonas
Quantum Physics
Machine Learning
Variational quantum circuits with angle encoding implement truncated Fourier series, and architectures arranging $N$ qubits with $L$ encoding layers each -- sharing encoding budget $E = NL$ -- generate identical frequency spectra, identical frequency redundancy, and require the same minimum parameter count for coefficient control. Despite this equivalence, trainability varies substantially with architecture shape $(N,L)$ at fixed $E$. We identify structural rank deficiency of the coefficient matching Jacobian $J$ as the mechanism responsible. For serial single-qubit architectures, we prove $\mathrm{rank}(J) \leq 2L+1$ regardless of parameter count $P$, with $\dim(\ker J) \geq P-(2L+1)$ growing without bound -- a phenomenon we term \emph{structural gradient starvation}: a growing fraction of parameters become structurally decoupled from the loss as $P$ increases at fixed $L$. Parallel architectures avoid this via independent phase trajectories, ensuring $σ_{\min}(J^{(\mathrm{par})}) > 0$ generically for $P \leq 2E+1$, so no parameter lies in $\ker J$. For practitioners, we further show that the two natural routes to increasing parameter count have fundamentally different effects: adding feature map (FM) layers monotonically strengthens the Jacobian QFIM eigenvalue spectrum and achieves $R^2 \geq 0.95$ with $1.6$--$2.2\times$ fewer parameters than adding trainable blocks across all tested architectures, while trainable blocks improve training only through the classical interpolation mechanism with no quantum-specific benefit.
title Architecture Shape Governs QNN Trainability: Jacobian Null Space Growth and Parameter Efficiency
topic Quantum Physics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05942