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Quantinuum Scientists Show How Bayesian Approach Leads to More Robust Circuits

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Taking a Bayesian approach to training quantum circuits may lead to circuits that are faster to execute and less noisy than the circuits, according to a team of Quantinuum scientists. These new, more robust circuits would be ideal for tasks including optimization and machine learning, for example.

In a study, published on the pre-print server, ArXiv, the team reports that experiments on the company’s H1-2 quantum computer demonstrates that the resulting circuits are faster to execute and less noisy than the circuits trained without the dimension reduction strategy. The team included Sam Duffield, Marcello Benedetti and Matthias Rosenkranz.

According to the scientists, current hardware noise and limited qubits hamper the performance of quantum computers. Because of this, variational quantum algorithms, which use a classical optimizer to train a parameterized quantum circuit, are often relied on for practical applications on today’s quantum technology.

The researchers  reformulate that classical optimizer with a Bayesian — or, a probabilistic — approach.

In an explanation of the process on Twitter, Rosenkranz writes, “The Bayesian perspective aims at inferring the posterior over circuit parameters based on a generalised likelihood and prior over parameter. The likelihood encodes a cost and priors can help enforce desirable properties such as sparsity or correlations.”

Results from hardware execution of circuits trained with proximal gradient ascent with 0% and 45% of parameters removed. The experiments confirm reduced execution time and lower total variation distance for 45% parameterised gates removedHe added that an experiment on Quantinuum’s trapped-ion quantum computer showed that removing gates, especially 2-qubit, offer faster execution and less noise on the hardware. We confirm this intuition with an experiment on a Quantinuum trapped-ion quantum computer

According to Rosenkranz, this might just be the beginning of using the Bayesian learning approach to boost quantum performance.

“Bayesian perspective leaves room for lots of future research. E.g. can priors used in this principled way enforce symmetries or parameter correlations and help with barren plateaus or generalisation?” he writes on Twitter.

The researchers also add in the paper: “We have only investigated point estimate and Monte Carlo approximations to the posterior. A natural next step would be to consider a variational inference approach, although care would need to be taken when constructing a variational family of distributions that are well-defined for angular parameters.”

Here is more information on Quantinuum’s hardware and their research team here.

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Matt Swayne

With a several-decades long background in journalism and communications, Matt Swayne has worked as a science communicator for an R1 university for more than 12 years, specializing in translating high tech and deep tech for the general audience. He has served as a writer, editor and analyst at The Quantum Insider since its inception. In addition to his service as a science communicator, Matt also develops courses to improve the media and communications skills of scientists and has taught courses. [email protected]

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