Mo Kordzanganeh

Mo Kordzanganeh, Pavel Sekatski, Leonid Fedichkin et al.

Quantum machine learning has become an area of growing interest but has certain theoretical and hardware-specific limitations. Notably, the problem of vanishing gradients, or barren plateaus, renders the training impossible for circuits with high qubit counts, imposing a limit on the number of qubits that data scientists can use for solving problems. Independently, angle-embedded supervised quantum neural networks were shown to produce truncated Fourier series with a degree directly dependent on two factors: the depth of the encoding and the number of parallel qubits the encoding applied to. The degree of the Fourier series limits the model expressivity. This work introduces two new architectures whose Fourier degrees grow exponentially: the sequential and parallel exponential quantum machine learning architectures. This is done by efficiently using the available Hilbert space when encoding, increasing the expressivity of the quantum encoding. Therefore, the exponential growth allows staying at the low-qubit limit to create highly expressive circuits avoiding barren plateaus. Practically, parallel exponential architecture was shown to outperform the existing linear architectures by reducing their final mean square error value by up to 44.7% in a one-dimensional test problem. Furthermore, the feasibility of this technique was also shown on a trapped ion quantum processing unit.

Serge Rainjonneau, Igor Tokarev, Sergei Iudin et al.

Earth imaging satellites are a crucial part of our everyday lives that enable global tracking of industrial activities. Use cases span many applications, from weather forecasting to digital maps, carbon footprint tracking, and vegetation monitoring. However, there are limitations; satellites are difficult to manufacture, expensive to maintain, and tricky to launch into orbit. Therefore, satellites must be employed efficiently. This poses a challenge known as the satellite mission planning problem, which could be computationally prohibitive to solve on large scales. However, close-to-optimal algorithms, such as greedy reinforcement learning and optimization algorithms, can often provide satisfactory resolutions. This paper introduces a set of quantum algorithms to solve the mission planning problem and demonstrate an advantage over the classical algorithms implemented thus far. The problem is formulated as maximizing the number of high-priority tasks completed on real datasets containing thousands of tasks and multiple satellites. This work demonstrates that through solution-chaining and clustering, optimization and machine learning algorithms offer the greatest potential for optimal solutions. This paper notably illustrates that a hybridized quantum-enhanced reinforcement learning agent can achieve a completion percentage of 98.5% over high-priority tasks, significantly improving over the baseline greedy methods with a completion rate of 75.8%. The results presented in this work pave the way to quantum-enabled solutions in the space industry and, more generally, future mission planning problems across industries.

Asel Sagingalieva, Mo Kordzanganeh, Andrii Kurkin et al.

Image recognition is one of the primary applications of machine learning algorithms. Nevertheless, machine learning models used in modern image recognition systems consist of millions of parameters that usually require significant computational time to be adjusted. Moreover, adjustment of model hyperparameters leads to additional overhead. Because of this, new developments in machine learning models and hyperparameter optimization techniques are required. This paper presents a quantum-inspired hyperparameter optimization technique and a hybrid quantum-classical machine learning model for supervised learning. We benchmark our hyperparameter optimization method over standard black-box objective functions and observe performance improvements in the form of reduced expected run times and fitness in response to the growth in the size of the search space. We test our approaches in a car image classification task and demonstrate a full-scale implementation of the hybrid quantum ResNet model with the tensor train hyperparameter optimization. Our tests show a qualitative and quantitative advantage over the corresponding standard classical tabular grid search approach used with a deep neural network ResNet34. A classification accuracy of 0.97 was obtained by the hybrid model after 18 iterations, whereas the classical model achieved an accuracy of 0.92 after 75 iterations.

Nathan Haboury, Mo Kordzanganeh, Sebastian Schmitt et al.

Managing the response to natural disasters effectively can considerably mitigate their devastating impact. This work explores the potential of using supervised hybrid quantum machine learning to optimize emergency evacuation plans for cars during natural disasters. The study focuses on earthquake emergencies and models the problem as a dynamic computational graph where an earthquake damages an area of a city. The residents seek to evacuate the city by reaching the exit points where traffic congestion occurs. The situation is modeled as a shortest-path problem on an uncertain and dynamically evolving map. We propose a novel hybrid supervised learning approach and test it on hypothetical situations on a concrete city graph. This approach uses a novel quantum feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) neural network parallel to a classical FiLM network to imitate Dijkstra's node-wise shortest path algorithm on a deterministic dynamic graph. Adding the quantum neural network in parallel increases the overall model's expressivity by splitting the dataset's harmonic and non-harmonic features between the quantum and classical components. The hybrid supervised learning agent is trained on a dataset of Dijkstra's shortest paths and can successfully learn the navigation task. The hybrid quantum network improves over the purely classical supervised learning approach by 7% in accuracy. We show that the quantum part has a significant contribution of 45.(3)% to the prediction and that the network could be executed on an ion-based quantum computer. The results demonstrate the potential of supervised hybrid quantum machine learning in improving emergency evacuation planning during natural disasters.

Mo Kordzanganeh, Daria Kosichkina, Alexey Melnikov

Quantum neural networks represent a new machine learning paradigm that has recently attracted much attention due to its potential promise. Under certain conditions, these models approximate the distribution of their dataset with a truncated Fourier series. The trigonometric nature of this fit could result in angle-embedded quantum neural networks struggling to fit the non-harmonic features in a given dataset. Moreover, the interpretability of neural networks remains a challenge. In this work, we introduce a new, interpretable class of hybrid quantum neural networks that pass the inputs of the dataset in parallel to 1) a classical multi-layered perceptron and 2) a variational quantum circuit, and then the outputs of the two are linearly combined. We observe that the quantum neural network creates a smooth sinusoidal foundation base on the training set, and then the classical perceptrons fill the non-harmonic gaps in the landscape. We demonstrate this claim on two synthetic datasets sampled from periodic distributions with added protrusions as noise. The training results indicate that the parallel hybrid network architecture could improve the solution optimality on periodic datasets with additional noise.

Andrii Kurkin, Jonas Hegemann, Mo Kordzanganeh et al.

Efficient and sustainable power generation is a crucial concern in the energy sector. In particular, thermal power plants grapple with accurately predicting steam mass flow, which is crucial for operational efficiency and cost reduction. In this study, we use a parallel hybrid neural network architecture that combines a parametrized quantum circuit and a conventional feed-forward neural network specifically designed for time-series prediction in industrial settings to enhance predictions of steam mass flow 15 minutes into the future. Our results show that the parallel hybrid model outperforms standalone classical and quantum models, achieving more than 5.7 and 4.9 times lower mean squared error loss on the test set after training compared to pure classical and pure quantum networks, respectively. Furthermore, the hybrid model demonstrates smaller relative errors between the ground truth and the model predictions on the test set, up to 2 times better than the pure classical model. These findings contribute to the broader scientific understanding of how integrating quantum and classical machine learning techniques can be applied to real-world challenges faced by the energy sector, ultimately leading to optimized power plant operations. To our knowledge, this study constitutes the first parallel hybrid quantum-classical architecture deployed on a real-world power-plant dataset, illustrating how near-term quantum resources can already augment classical analytics in the energy sector.

Basil Kyriacou, Mo Kordzanganeh, Maniraman Periyasamy et al.

Quantum operations on pure states can be fully represented by unitary matrices. Variational quantum circuits, also known as quantum neural networks, embed data and trainable parameters into gate-based operations and optimize the parameters via gradient descent. The high cost of training and low fidelity of current quantum devices, however, restricts much of quantum machine learning to classical simulation. For few-qubit problems with large datasets, training the matrix elements directly, as is done with weight matrices in classical neural networks, can be faster than decomposing data and parameters into gates. We propose a method that trains matrices directly while maintaining unitarity through a single regularization term added to the loss function. A second training step, circuit alignment, then recovers a gate-based architecture from the resulting soft-unitary. On a five-qubit supervised classification task with 1000 datapoints, this two-step process produces a trained variational circuit in under four minutes, compared to over two hours for direct circuit training, while achieving lower binary cross-entropy loss. In a second experiment, soft-unitaries are embedded in a hybrid quantum-classical network for a reinforcement learning cartpole task, where the hybrid agent outperforms a purely classical baseline of comparable size.

Viktoria Patapovich, Mo Kordzanganeh, Alexey Melnikov

Quantum machine learning has shown promise for high-dimensional data analysis, yet many existing approaches rely on linear unitary operations and shared trainable parameters across outputs. These constraints limit expressivity and scalability relative to the multi-layered, non-linear architectures of classical deep networks. We introduce superposed parameterised quantum circuits to overcome these limitations. By combining flip-flop quantum random-access memory with repeat-until-success protocols, a superposed parameterised quantum circuit embeds an exponential number of parameterised sub-models in a single circuit and induces polynomial activation functions through amplitude transformations and post-selection. We provide an analytic description of the architecture, showing how multiple parameter sets are trained in parallel while non-linear amplitude transformations broaden representational power beyond conventional quantum kernels. Numerical experiments underscore these advantages: on a 1D step-function regression a two-qubit superposed parameterised quantum circuit cuts the mean-squared error by three orders of magnitude versus a parameter-matched variational baseline; on a 2D star-shaped two-dimensional classification task, introducing a quadratic activation lifts accuracy to 81.4% and reduces run-to-run variance three-fold. These results position superposed parameterised quantum circuits as a hardware-efficient route toward deeper, more versatile parameterised quantum circuits capable of learning complex decision boundaries.

Viacheslav Kuzmin, Basil Kyriacou, Mateusz Papierz et al.

Hardware-efficient circuits employed in Quantum Machine Learning are typically composed of alternating layers of uniformly applied gates. High-speed numerical simulators for such circuits are crucial for advancing research in this field. In this work, we numerically benchmark universal and gate-specific techniques for simulating the action of layers of gates on quantum state vectors, aiming to accelerate the overall simulation of Quantum Machine Learning algorithms. Our analysis shows that the optimal simulation method for a given layer of gates depends on the number of qubits involved, and that a tailored combination of techniques can yield substantial performance gains in the forward and backward passes for a given circuit. Building on these insights, we developed a numerical simulator, named TQml Simulator, that employs the most efficient simulation method for each layer in a given circuit. We evaluated TQml Simulator on circuits constructed from standard gate sets, such as rotations and CNOTs, as well as on native gates from IonQ and IBM quantum processing units. In most cases, our simulator outperforms equivalent Pennylane's default_qubit simulator by up to a factor of 10, depending on the circuit, the number of qubits, the batch size of the input data, and the hardware used.

Nathan Haboury, Mo Kordzanganeh, Alexey Melnikov et al.

The information plane (Tishby et al. arXiv:physics/0004057, Shwartz-Ziv et al. arXiv:1703.00810) has been proposed as an analytical tool for studying the learning dynamics of neural networks. It provides quantitative insight on how the model approaches the learned state by approximating a minimal sufficient statistics. In this paper we extend this tool to the domain of quantum learning models. In a second step, we study how the insight on how much the model compresses the input data (provided by the information plane) can be used to improve a learning algorithm. Specifically, we consider two ways to do so: via a multiplicative regularization of the loss function, or with a compression-gnostic scheduler of the learning rate (for algorithms based on gradient descent). Both ways turn out to be equivalent in our implementation. Finally, we benchmark the proposed learning algorithms on several classification and regression tasks using variational quantum circuits. The results demonstrate an improvement in test accuracy and convergence speed for both synthetic and real-world datasets. Additionally, with one example we analyzed the impact of the proposed modifications on the performances of neural networks in a classification task.

Mo Kordzanganeh, Danial Keshvary, Nariman Arian

Latent diffusion models are the state-of-the-art for synthetic image generation. To align these models with human preferences, training the models using reinforcement learning on human feedback is crucial. Black et. al 2024 introduced denoising diffusion policy optimisation (DDPO), which accounts for the iterative denoising nature of the generation by modelling it as a Markov chain with a final reward. As the reward is a single value that determines the model's performance on the entire image, the model has to navigate a very sparse reward landscape and so requires a large sample count. In this work, we extend the DDPO by presenting the Pixel-wise Policy Optimisation (PXPO) algorithm, which can take feedback for each pixel, providing a more nuanced reward to the model.