Self-Attention Mechanism (SAM) excels at distilling important information from the interior of data to improve the computational efficiency of models. Nevertheless, many Quantum Machine Learning (QML) models lack the ability to distinguish the intrinsic connections of information like SAM, which limits their effectiveness on massive high-dimensional quantum data. To tackle the above issue, a Quantum Kernel Self-Attention Mechanism (QKSAM) is introduced to combine the data representation merit of Quantum Kernel Methods (QKM) with the efficient information extraction capability of SAM. Further, a Quantum Kernel Self-Attention Network (QKSAN) framework is proposed based on QKSAM, which ingeniously incorporates the Deferred Measurement Principle (DMP) and conditional measurement techniques to release half of quantum resources by mid-circuit measurement, thereby bolstering both feasibility and adaptability. Simultaneously, the Quantum Kernel Self-Attention Score (QKSAS) with an exponentially large characterization space is spawned to accommodate more information and determine the measurement conditions. Eventually, four QKSAN sub-models are deployed on PennyLane and IBM Qiskit platforms to perform binary classification on MNIST and Fashion MNIST, where the QKSAS tests and correlation assessments between noise immunity and learning ability are executed on the best-performing sub-model. The paramount experimental finding is that a potential learning advantage is revealed in partial QKSAN subclasses that acquire an impressive more than 98.05% high accuracy with very few parameters that are much less in aggregate than classical machine learning models. Predictably, QKSAN lays the foundation for future quantum computers to perform machine learning on massive amounts of data while driving advances in areas such as quantum computer vision.

Quantum computing promises to solve difficult optimization problems in chemistry, physics and mathematics more efficiently than classical computers, but requires fault-tolerant quantum computers with millions of qubits. To overcome errors introduced by today's quantum computers, hybrid algorithms combining classical and quantum computers are used. In this paper we tackle the multiple query optimization problem (MQO) which is an important NP-hard problem in the area of data-intensive problems. We propose a novel hybrid classical-quantum algorithm to solve the MQO on a gate-based quantum computer. We perform a detailed experimental evaluation of our algorithm and compare its performance against a competing approach that employs a quantum annealer -- another type of quantum computer. Our experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm currently can only handle small problem sizes due to the limited number of qubits available on a gate-based quantum computer compared to a quantum computer based on quantum annealing. However, our algorithm shows a qubit efficiency of close to 99% which is almost a factor of 2 higher compared to the state of the art implementation. Finally, we analyze how our algorithm scales with larger problem sizes and conclude that our approach shows promising results for near-term quantum computers.

Probabilistic Quantum Memory (PQM) is a data structure that computes the distance from a binary input to all binary patterns stored in superposition on the memory. This data structure allows the development of heuristics to speed up artificial neural networks architecture selection. In this work, we propose an improved parametric version of the PQM to perform pattern classification, and we also present a PQM quantum circuit suitable for Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers. We present a classical evaluation of a parametric PQM network classifier on public benchmark datasets. We also perform experiments to verify the viability of PQM on a 5-qubit quantum computer. Introduction Quantum Computing is a computational paradigm that has been harvesting increasing attention for decades now. Several quantum algorithms have time advantages over their best known classical counterparts [1, 2, 3, 4]. The current advances in quantum hardware are bringing us to the era of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers [5]. The quest for quantum supremacy is the search for an efficient solution of a task in a quantum computer that current classical computers are not able to efficiently solve. Some authors argue that given the current state of the art, we will achieve quantum supremacy in the next few years [6]. One of the approaches to achieve this supremacy and to expand the potential applications of quantum computers is through quantum machine learning [7]. Machine learning (ML) [8] aims at developing automated ways for computers to learn a specific task from a given set of data samples.