Hyperparameter optimization (HPO) of neural networks is a computationally expensive procedure, which requires a large number of different model configurations to be trained. To reduce such costs, this work presents a distributed, hybrid workflow, that runs the training of the neural networks on multiple graphics processing units (GPUs) on a classical supercomputer, while predicting the configurations’ performance with quantum-trained support vector regression (QT-SVR) on a quantum annealer (QA). The workflow is shown to run on up to 50 GPUs and a QA at the same time, completely automating the communication between the classical and the quantum systems. The approach is evaluated extensively on several benchmarking datasets from the computer vision (CV), high-energy physics (HEP), and natural language processing (NLP) domains. Empirical results show that resource costs for performing HPO can be reduced by up to 9% when using the hybrid workflow with performance prediction, compared to using a plain HPO algorithm without performance prediction. Additionally, the workflow obtains similar and in some cases even better accuracy of the final hyperparameter configuration, when combining multiple heuristically obtained predictions from the QA, compared to using just a single classically obtained prediction. The results highlight the potential of hybrid quantum-classical machine learning algorithms. The workflow code is made available open-source to foster adoption in the community.

In the field of quantum computing, variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) represent a pivotal category of quantum solutions across a broad spectrum of applications. These algorithms demonstrate significant potential for realising quantum computational advantage. A fundamental aspect of VQAs involves formulating expressive and efficient quantum circuits (namely ansatz), and automating the search of such ansatz is known as quantum architecture search (QAS). Recently reinforcement learning (RL) techniques is utilized to automate the search for ansatzes, know as RL-QAS. This study investigates RL-QAS for crafting ansatz tailored to the variational quantum state diagonalisation problem. Our investigation includes a comprehensive analysis of various dimensions, such as the entanglement thresholds of the resultant states, the impact of initial conditions on the performance of RL-agent, the phase transition behaviour of correlation in concurrence bounds, and the discrete contributions of qubits in deducing eigenvalues through conditional entropy metrics. We leverage these insights to devise an entanglement-guided admissible ansatz in QAS to diagonalise random quantum states using optimal resources. Furthermore, the methodologies presented herein offer a generalised framework for constructing reward functions within RL-QAS applicable to variational quantum algorithms.

The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is a leading iterative variational quantum algorithm for heuristically solving combinatorial optimization problems. A large portion of the computational effort in QAOA is spent by the optimization steps, which require many executions of the quantum circuit. Therefore, there is active research focusing on finding better initial circuit parameters, which would reduce the number of required iterations and hence the overall execution time. While existing methods for parameter initialization have shown great success, they often offer a single set of parameters for all problem instances. We propose a practical method that uses a simple, fully connected neural network that leverages previous executions of QAOA to find better initialization parameters tailored to a new given problem instance. We benchmark state-of-the-art initialization methods for solving the MaxCut problem of Erdős-Rényi graphs using QAOA and show that our method is consistently the fastest to converge while also yielding the best final result. Furthermore, the parameters predicted by the neural network are shown to match very well with the fully optimized parameters, to the extent that no iterative steps are required, thereby effectively realizing an iteration-free QAOA scheme.

A substantial portion of global quantum computing research has been conducted using quantum mechanics, which recently has been applied to quantum computers. However, the design of a quantum algorithm requires a comprehensive understanding of quantum mechanics and physical procedures. This work presents a quantum procedure for estimating information gain. It is aimed at making quantum computing accessible to those without preliminary knowledge of quantum mechanics. The procedure can be a basis for building data mining processes according to measures from information theory using quantum computers. The main advantage of this procedure is the use of amplitude encoding and the inner product of two quantum states to calculate the conditional entropy between two vectors. The method was implemented using the IBM simulator and tested over a dataset of six features and a Boolean target variable. The results showed a correlation of 0.942 between the ranks achieved by the classical and quantum computations with a significance of p < 0.005.

Quantum machine learning with variational quantum algorithms (VQA) has been actively investigated as a practical algorithm in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era. Recent researches reveal that the data reuploading, which repeatedly encode classical data into quantum circuit, is necessary for obtaining the expressive quantum machine learning model in the conventional quantum computing architecture. However, the data reuploading tends to require a large amount of quantum resources, which motivates us to find an alternative strategy for realizing the expressive quantum machine learning efficiently. In this paper, we propose quantum machine learning with Kerr-nonlinear parametric oscillators (KPOs), as another promising quantum computing device. We use not only the ground state and first excited state but also higher excited states, which allows us to use a large Hilbert space even if we have a single KPO. Our numerical simulations show that the expressibility of our method with only one mode of the KPO is much higher than that of the conventional method with six qubits. Our results pave the way towards resource-efficient quantum machine learning, which is essential for the practical applications in the NISQ era.

Gaussian process regression is a well-established Bayesian machine learning method. We propose a new approach to Gaussian process regression using quantum kernels based on parameterized quantum circuits. By employing a hardware-efficient feature map and careful regularization of the Gram matrix, we demonstrate that the variance information of the resulting quantum Gaussian process can be preserved. We also show that quantum Gaussian processes can be used as a surrogate model for Bayesian optimization, a task that critically relies on the variance of the surrogate model. To demonstrate the performance of this quantum Bayesian optimization algorithm, we apply it to the hyperparameter optimization of a machine learning model which performs regression on a real-world dataset. We benchmark the quantum Bayesian optimization against its classical counterpart and show that quantum version can match its performance.