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Minimizing classical resources in variational measurement-based quantum computation for generative modeling

Majumder, Arunava, Nautrup, Hendrik Poulsen, Briegel, Hans J.

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Measurement-based quantum computation (MBQC) is a framework for quantum information processing in which a computational task is carried out through one-qubit measurements on a highly entangled resource state. Due to the indeterminacy of the outcomes of a quantum measurement, the random outcomes of these operations, if not corrected, yield a variational quantum channel family. Traditionally, this randomness is corrected through classical processing in order to ensure deterministic unitary computations. Recently, variational measurement-based quantum computation (VMBQC) has been introduced to exploit this measurement-induced randomness to gain an advantage in generative modeling. A limitation of this approach is that the corresponding channel model has twice as many parameters compared to the unitary model, scaling as $N \times D$, where $N$ is the number of logical qubits (width) and $D$ is the depth of the VMBQC model. This can often make optimization more difficult and may lead to poorly trainable models. In this paper, we present a restricted VMBQC model that extends the unitary setting to a channel-based one using only a single additional trainable parameter. We show, both numerically and algebraically, that this minimal extension is sufficient to generate probability distributions that cannot be learned by the corresponding unitary model.


Towards Enabling Meta-Learning from Target Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Meta-learning can extract an inductive bias from previous learning experience and assist the training of new tasks. It is often realized through optimizing a meta-model with the evaluation loss of task-specific solvers. Most existing algorithms sample non-overlapping $\mathit{support}$ sets and $\mathit{query}$ sets to train and evaluate the solvers respectively due to simplicity ($\mathcal{S}$/$\mathcal{Q}$ protocol). Different from $\mathcal{S}$/$\mathcal{Q}$ protocol, we can also evaluate a task-specific solver by comparing it to a target model $\mathcal{T}$, which is the optimal model for this task or a model that behaves well enough on this task ($\mathcal{S}$/$\mathcal{T}$ protocol). Although being short of research, $\mathcal{S}$/$\mathcal{T}$ protocol has unique advantages such as offering more informative supervision, but it is computationally expensive. This paper looks into this special evaluation method and takes a step towards putting it into practice. We find that with a small ratio of tasks armed with target models, classic meta-learning algorithms can be improved a lot without consuming many resources. We empirically verify the effectiveness of $\mathcal{S}$/$\mathcal{T}$ protocol in a typical application of meta-learning, $\mathit{i.e.}$, few-shot learning. In detail, after constructing target models by fine-tuning the pre-trained network on those hard tasks, we match the task-specific solvers and target models via knowledge distillation.