Amer Delilbasic

Amer Delilbasic, Bertrand Le Saux, Morris Riedel et al.

In recent years, the development of quantum annealers has enabled experimental demonstrations and has increased research interest in applications of quantum annealing, such as in quantum machine learning and in particular for the popular quantum SVM. Several versions of the quantum SVM have been proposed, and quantum annealing has been shown to be effective in them. Extensions to multiclass problems have also been made, which consist of an ensemble of multiple binary classifiers. This work proposes a novel quantum SVM formulation for direct multiclass classification based on quantum annealing, called Quantum Multiclass SVM (QMSVM). The multiclass classification problem is formulated as a single Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem solved with quantum annealing. The main objective of this work is to evaluate the feasibility, accuracy, and time performance of this approach. Experiments have been performed on the D-Wave Advantage quantum annealer for a classification problem on remote sensing data. The results indicate that, despite the memory demands of the quantum annealer, QMSVM can achieve accuracy that is comparable to standard SVM methods and, more importantly, it scales much more efficiently with the number of training examples, resulting in nearly constant time. This work shows an approach for bringing together classical and quantum computation, solving practical problems in remote sensing with current hardware.

Rui Wang, Edoardo Pasetto, Amer Delilbasic et al.

Statistical downscaling is a crucial component of the weather modeling field, where high-resolution outputs must be reconstructed from coarse-resolution inputs with the full cost of dynamical refinement. In this work, we investigate a hybrid quantum-classical corrective diffusion model for probabilistic statistical downscaling of weather fields. The proposed model inserts variational quantum circuit layers into the most compressed bottleneck of the diffusion UNet while leaving the regression branch fully classical. This placement tests whether quantum circuits can act as compact nonlinear feature maps for latent-channel mixing. We evaluate intra-channel and cross-channel ansätze on 10m wind components. On the 2020 validation set, the hybrid models remain stable, preserve the large-scale spatial organization of the generated wind fields, and improve both MAE and CRPS relative to a classical corrective diffusion model in several configurations. Structural diagnostics further show that the hybrid variants preserve kinetic-energy spectra and windspeed distributions similar to its classical counterpart while producing controlled changes in tail behavior, extreme-windspeed localization, and joint wind field components structure. Backend studies on the 2020 validation set show negligible impact from simulated device noise at the tested circuit scale, whereas real-hardware deployment remains limited by qubit availability and execution fidelity. The 2021 out-of-distribution test shows that these in-distribution gains do not transfer uniformly under temporal shift, revealing a generalization gap that motivates future mitigation through stabilization and regularization. These results show that bottleneck-level quantum hybridization can make a nontrivial contribution to weather statistical downscaling, while also highlighting that circuit scale and hardware deployment remain key limiting factors.

Enrico Zardini, Amer Delilbasic, Enrico Blanzieri et al.

Support vector machines (SVMs) are widely used machine learning models (e.g., in remote sensing), with formulations for both classification and regression tasks. In the last years, with the advent of working quantum annealers, hybrid SVM models characterised by quantum training and classical execution have been introduced. These models have demonstrated comparable performance to their classical counterparts. However, they are limited in the training set size due to the restricted connectivity of the current quantum annealers. Hence, to take advantage of large datasets (like those related to Earth observation), a strategy is required. In the classical domain, local SVMs, namely, SVMs trained on the data samples selected by a k-nearest neighbors model, have already proven successful. Here, the local application of quantum-trained SVM models is proposed and empirically assessed. In particular, this approach allows overcoming the constraints on the training set size of the quantum-trained models while enhancing their performance. In practice, the FaLK-SVM method, designed for efficient local SVMs, has been combined with quantum-trained SVM models for binary and multiclass classification. In addition, for comparison, FaLK-SVM has been interfaced for the first time with a classical single-step multiclass SVM model (CS SVM). Concerning the empirical evaluation, D-Wave's quantum annealers and real-world datasets taken from the remote sensing domain have been employed. The results have shown the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed approach, but also its practical applicability in a real-world large-scale scenario.