Late Breaking Results: Hardware-Efficient Quantum Reservoir Computing via Quantized Readout
This work addresses energy forecasting for resource-constrained edge settings, but it is incremental as it focuses on quantization improvements to an existing method.
The paper tackled short-term load forecasting for grid stability by proposing a hardware-efficient Quantum Reservoir Computing framework with quantized readout, achieving forecasting accuracy within 1% of a baseline while reducing readout memory by up to 81%.
Due to rising electricity demand, accurate short-term load forecasting is increasingly important for grid stability and efficient energy management, particularly in resource-constrained edge settings. We present a hardware-efficient Quantum Reservoir Computing (QRC) framework based on a fixed, untrained quantum circuit with Chebyshev feature encoding, brickwork entanglement, and single- and two-qubit Pauli measurements, avoiding quantum backpropagation entirely. Using the Tetouan City Power Consumption dataset, we examine the effect of post-training fixed-point quantization on the classical readout layer, with the reservoir architecture selected through a genetic search over 18 candidate configurations. Under finite-shot evaluation, 8-bit and 6-bit quantization maintain forecasting accuracy within 1% of the FP32 baseline while reducing readout memory by 75% and 81%, respectively. These results suggest that quantized readout can improve the hardware efficiency and deployment practicality of QRC for memory-constrained energy forecasting.