Q-PhotoNAS: Hybrid Quantum Neural Architecture Search Framework on Photonic Devices

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Elnakhal, Farah, Marchisio, Alberto, Innan, Nouhaila, Falcao, Gabriel, Shafique, Muhammad
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866911704267358208
author Elnakhal, Farah
Marchisio, Alberto
Innan, Nouhaila
Falcao, Gabriel
Shafique, Muhammad
author_facet Elnakhal, Farah
Marchisio, Alberto
Innan, Nouhaila
Falcao, Gabriel
Shafique, Muhammad
contents Photonic quantum computing is a promising platform for scalable quantum machine learning, but designing effective hybrid architectures remains challenging under hardware and optimization constraints. Existing approaches rely on manually tuned architectures that fail to account for the collaboration between classical preprocessing, phase encoding, and photonic circuit structure, limiting both accuracy and hardware compatibility. In this paper, we propose a neural architecture search framework for hybrid photonic quantum-classical models that combines genetic algorithm-based search with learnable quantum phase encoding to systematically explore the joint design space of classical and quantum components. Our framework encodes 19 hyperparameters across six gene groups and evolves a population of hybrid architectures using group-based crossover, per-gene mutation, and elitism, evaluating each candidate on a short training budget before full retraining of the best found design. We evaluate our framework on two image classification benchmarks, Digits and MNIST, achieving final validation accuracies of 99.44% and 98.78%, respectively, with first-principles execution time estimates on the Quandela Ascella photonic QPU projecting single-image inference at 67 ms (Digits) and 149 ms (MNIST). Our quantum contribution analysis further shows that the photonic layer extracts non-redundant features orthogonal to the classical pathway, providing a measurable accuracy advantage over classical-only baselines. Our results demonstrate that automated architecture search is both practical and impactful for hybrid photonic systems, opening the way for systematic design space exploration of quantum AI on photonic devices.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_22097
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Q-PhotoNAS: Hybrid Quantum Neural Architecture Search Framework on Photonic Devices
Elnakhal, Farah
Marchisio, Alberto
Innan, Nouhaila
Falcao, Gabriel
Shafique, Muhammad
Quantum Physics
Machine Learning
Photonic quantum computing is a promising platform for scalable quantum machine learning, but designing effective hybrid architectures remains challenging under hardware and optimization constraints. Existing approaches rely on manually tuned architectures that fail to account for the collaboration between classical preprocessing, phase encoding, and photonic circuit structure, limiting both accuracy and hardware compatibility. In this paper, we propose a neural architecture search framework for hybrid photonic quantum-classical models that combines genetic algorithm-based search with learnable quantum phase encoding to systematically explore the joint design space of classical and quantum components. Our framework encodes 19 hyperparameters across six gene groups and evolves a population of hybrid architectures using group-based crossover, per-gene mutation, and elitism, evaluating each candidate on a short training budget before full retraining of the best found design. We evaluate our framework on two image classification benchmarks, Digits and MNIST, achieving final validation accuracies of 99.44% and 98.78%, respectively, with first-principles execution time estimates on the Quandela Ascella photonic QPU projecting single-image inference at 67 ms (Digits) and 149 ms (MNIST). Our quantum contribution analysis further shows that the photonic layer extracts non-redundant features orthogonal to the classical pathway, providing a measurable accuracy advantage over classical-only baselines. Our results demonstrate that automated architecture search is both practical and impactful for hybrid photonic systems, opening the way for systematic design space exploration of quantum AI on photonic devices.
title Q-PhotoNAS: Hybrid Quantum Neural Architecture Search Framework on Photonic Devices
topic Quantum Physics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22097