Quantum-Enhanced Generative Adversarial Networks: Comparative Analysis of Classical and Hybrid Quantum-Classical Generative Adversarial Networks
This work addresses the challenge of enhancing generative modeling for AI applications within the constraints of noisy quantum hardware, though it is incremental as it shows feasibility rather than superiority.
This study tackled the problem of improving generative adversarial networks (GANs) by using hybrid quantum-classical architectures with quantum generators for latent vectors, finding that a 7-qubit variant achieved competitive performance on binary MNIST, narrowing the gap with classical GANs in later epochs.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for producing high-fidelity data samples, yet their performance is constrained by the quality of latent representations, typically sampled from classical noise distributions. This study investigates hybrid quantum-classical GANs (HQCGANs) in which a quantum generator, implemented via parameterised quantum circuits, produces latent vectors for a classical discriminator. We evaluate a classical GAN alongside three HQCGAN variants with 3, 5, and 7 qubits, using Qiskit's AerSimulator with realistic noise models to emulate near-term quantum devices. The binary MNIST dataset (digits 0 and 1) is used to align with the low-dimensional latent spaces imposed by current quantum hardware. Models are trained for 150 epochs and assessed with Frechet Inception Distance (FID) and Kernel Inception Distance (KID). Results show that while the classical GAN achieved the best scores, the 7-qubit HQCGAN produced competitive performance, narrowing the gap in later epochs, whereas the 3-qubit model exhibited earlier convergence limitations. Efficiency analysis indicates only moderate training time increases despite quantum sampling overhead. These findings validate the feasibility of noisy quantum circuits as latent priors in GAN architectures, highlighting their potential to enhance generative modelling within the constraints of the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era.