Quantum advantage in training binary neural networks

Binary neural networks, i.e., neural networks whose parameters and activations are constrained to only two possible values, offer a compelling avenue for the deployment of deep learning models on energy- and memory-limited devices. However, their training, architectural design, and hyperparameter tuning remain challenging as these involve multiple computationally expensive combinatorial optimization problems. Here we introduce quantum hypernetworks as a mechanism to train bin...

Quantum annealing is a promising paradigm for building practical quantum computers. Compared to other approaches, quantum annealing technology has been scaled up to a larger number of qubits. On the other hand, deep learning has been profoundly successful in pushing the boundaries of AI. It is thus natural to investigate potentially game changing technologies such as quantum annealers to augment the capabilities of deep learning. In this work, we explore binary neural network...

Binary Neural Networks are a promising technique for implementing efficient deep models with reduced storage and computational requirements. The training of these is however, still a compute-intensive problem that grows drastically with the layer size and data input. At the core of this calculation is the linear regression problem. The Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd (HHL) quantum algorithm has gained relevance thanks to its promise of providing a quantum state containing the solution ...

Deep learning is one of the most successful and far-reaching strategies used in machine learning today. However, the scale and utility of neural networks is still greatly limited by the current hardware used to train them. These concerns have become increasingly pressing as conventional computers quickly approach physical limitations that will slow performance improvements in years to come. For these reasons, scientists have begun to explore alternative computing platforms, l...

Quantum machine learning has the potential for broad industrial applications, and the development of quantum algorithms for improving the performance of neural networks is of particular interest given the central role they play in machine learning today. In this paper we present quantum algorithms for training and evaluating feedforward neural networks based on the canonical classical feedforward and backpropagation algorithms. Our algorithms rely on an efficient quantum subr...

The power of quantum computers is still somewhat speculative. While they are certainly faster than classical ones at some tasks, the class of problems they can efficiently solve has not been mapped definitively onto known classical complexity theory. This means that we do not know for which calculations there will be a "quantum advantage," once an algorithm is found. One way to answer the question is to find those algorithms, but finding truly quantum algorithms turns out to ...

This paper describes how to make the problem of binary classification amenable to quantum computing. A formulation is employed in which the binary classifier is constructed as a thresholded linear superposition of a set of weak classifiers. The weights in the superposition are optimized in a learning process that strives to minimize the training error as well as the number of weak classifiers used. No efficient solution to this problem is known. To bring it into a format that...

Artificial neural networks are at the heart of modern deep learning algorithms. We describe how to embed and train a general neural network in a quantum annealer without introducing any classical element in training. To implement the network on a state-of-the-art quantum annealer, we develop three crucial ingredients: binary encoding the free parameters of the network, polynomial approximation of the activation function, and reduction of binary higher-order polynomials into q...

The training of neural networks (NNs) is a computationally intensive task requiring significant time and resources. This paper presents a novel approach to NN training using Adiabatic Quantum Computing (AQC), a paradigm that leverages the principles of adiabatic evolution to solve optimisation problems. We propose a universal AQC method that can be implemented on gate quantum computers, allowing for a broad range of Hamiltonians and thus enabling the training of expressive ne...

Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) have been recently proposed as generalizations of classical neural networks to achieve the quantum speed-up. Despite the potential to outperform classical models, serious bottlenecks exist for training QNNs; namely, QNNs with random structures have poor trainability due to the vanishing gradient with rate exponential to the input qubit number. The vanishing gradient could seriously influence the applications of large-size QNNs. In this work, we ...