Recent advancements highlight the pivotal role of quantum machine learning (QML) [4, 13] in processing quantum data derived from quantum systems [14]. A fundamental task in QML is generating quantum data by learning the underlying distribution, essential for understanding quantum systems, synthesizing new samples, and advancing applications in quantum chemistry and materials science. However, extending classical generative approaches to quantum data presents significant challenges, as quantum distributions exhibit superposition, entanglement, and non-locality that classical models struggle to replicate efficiently. Quantum generative models such as quantum generative adversarial networks [24, 42] and quantum variational autoencoders [20, 38] can be used to prepare a fixed single quantum state [21, 28, 37], but are inefficient for generating ensembles of quantum states [3] due to the need for training deep parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs). The quantum denoising diffusion probabilistic model [40] offers a promising approach that employs intermediate training steps to smoothly interpolate between the target distribution and noise, thereby enabling efficient training.

Note that this is defined up to an absolute phase, i.e. Learning models In this section we first describe the learning models we will be concerned with in this paper. Such quantum examples have been investigated in prior works [6, 8, 9]. A natural way to extend the learning model is to allow the algorithm quantum statistical queries . QSQ model allows a quantum advantage in learning in this framework.

Classification using variational quantum circuits is a promising frontier in quantum machine learning. Quantum supervised learning (QSL) applied to classical data using variational quantum circuits involves embedding the data into a quantum Hilbert space and optimizing the circuit parameters to train the measurement process. In this context, the efficacy of QSL is inherently influenced by the selection of quantum embedding. In this study, we introduce a classical-quantum hybrid approach for optimizing quantum embedding beyond the limitations of the standard circuit model of quantum computation (i.e., completely positive and trace-preserving maps) for general multi-channel data. We benchmark the performance of various models in our framework using the CIFAR-10 and Tiny ImageNet datasets and provide theoretical analyses that guide model design and optimization.

Distances between probability distributions are a key component of many statistical machine learning tasks, from two-sample testing to generative modeling, among others. We introduce a novel distance between measures that compares them through a Schatten norm of their kernel covariance operators. We show that this new distance is an integral probability metric that can be framed between a Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) and a Wasserstein distance. In particular, we show that it avoids some pitfalls of MMD, by being more discriminative and robust to the choice of hyperparameters. Moreover, it benefits from some compelling properties of kernel methods, that can avoid the curse of dimensionality for their sample complexity. We provide an algorithm to compute the distance in practice by introducing an extension of kernel matrix for difference of distributions that could be of independent interest. Those advantages are illustrated by robust approximate Bayesian computation under contamination as well as particle flow simulations.

Quantum error correction is crucial for protecting quantum information against decoherence. Traditional codes like the surface code require substantial overhead, making them impractical for near-term, early fault-tolerant devices. We propose a novel objective function for tailoring error correction codes to specific noise structures by maximizing the distinguishability between quantum states after a noise channel, ensuring efficient recovery operations. We formalize this concept with the distinguishability loss function, serving as a machine learning objective to discover resource-efficient encoding circuits optimized for given noise characteristics. We implement this methodology using variational techniques, termed variational quantum error correction (VarQEC). Our approach yields codes with desirable theoretical and practical properties and outperforms standard codes in various scenarios. We also provide proof-of-concept demonstrations on IBM and IQM hardware devices, highlighting the practical relevance of our procedure.

The characterization of Hamiltonians and other components of open quantum dynamical systems plays a crucial role in quantum computing and other applications. Scientific machine learning techniques have been applied to this problem in a variety of ways, including by modeling with deep neural networks. However, the majority of mathematical models describing open quantum systems are linear, and the natural nonlinearities in learnable models have not been incorporated using physical principles. We present a data-driven model for open quantum systems that includes learnable, thermodynamically consistent terms. The trained model is interpretable, as it directly estimates the system Hamiltonian and linear components of coupling to the environment. We validate the model on synthetic two and three-level data, as well as experimental two-level data collected from a quantum device at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

In classical information theory, the Doeblin coefficient of a classical channel provides an efficiently computable upper bound on the total-variation contraction coefficient of the channel, leading to what is known as a strong data-processing inequality. Here, we investigate quantum Doeblin coefficients as a generalization of the classical concept. In particular, we define various new quantum Doeblin coefficients, one of which has several desirable properties, including concatenation and multiplicativity, in addition to being efficiently computable. We also develop various interpretations of two of the quantum Doeblin coefficients, including representations as minimal singlet fractions, exclusion values, reverse max-mutual and oveloH informations, reverse robustnesses, and hypothesis testing reverse mutual and oveloH informations. Our interpretations of quantum Doeblin coefficients as either entanglement-assisted or unassisted exclusion values are particularly appealing, indicating that they are proportional to the best possible error probabilities one could achieve in state-exclusion tasks by making use of the channel. We also outline various applications of quantum Doeblin coefficients, ranging from limitations on quantum machine learning algorithms that use parameterized quantum circuits (noise-induced barren plateaus), on error mitigation protocols, on the sample complexity of noisy quantum hypothesis testing, on the fairness of noisy quantum models, and on mixing times of time-varying channels. All of these applications make use of the fact that quantum Doeblin coefficients appear in upper bounds on various trace-distance contraction coefficients of a channel. Furthermore, in all of these applications, our analysis using Doeblin coefficients provides improvements of various kinds over contributions from prior literature, both in terms of generality and being efficiently computable.

In this work, we initiate the study of Hamiltonian learning for positive temperature bosonic Gaussian states, the quantum generalization of the widely studied problem of learning Gaussian graphical models. We obtain efficient protocols, both in sample and computational complexity, for the task of inferring the parameters of their underlying quadratic Hamiltonian under the assumption of bounded temperature, squeezing, displacement and maximal degree of the interaction graph. Our protocol only requires heterodyne measurements, which are often experimentally feasible, and has a sample complexity that scales logarithmically with the number of modes. Furthermore, we show that it is possible to learn the underlying interaction graph in a similar setting and sample complexity. Taken together, our results put the status of the quantum Hamiltonian learning problem for continuous variable systems in a much more advanced state when compared to spins, where state-of-the-art results are either unavailable or quantitatively inferior to ours. In addition, we use our techniques to obtain the first results on learning Gaussian states in trace distance with a quadratic scaling in precision and polynomial in the number of modes, albeit imposing certain restrictions on the Gaussian states. Our main technical innovations are several continuity bounds for the covariance and Hamiltonian matrix of a Gaussian state, which are of independent interest, combined with what we call the local inversion technique. In essence, the local inversion technique allows us to reliably infer the Hamiltonian of a Gaussian state by only estimating in parallel submatrices of the covariance matrix whose size scales with the desired precision, but not the number of modes. This way we bypass the need to obtain precise global estimates of the covariance matrix, controlling the sample complexity.

Understanding and improving generalization capabilities is crucial for both classical and quantum machine learning (QML). Recent studies have revealed shortcomings in current generalization theories, particularly those relying on uniform bounds, across both classical and quantum settings. In this work, we present a margin-based generalization bound for QML models, providing a more reliable framework for evaluating generalization. Our experimental studies on the quantum phase recognition (QPR) dataset demonstrate that margin-based metrics are strong predictors of generalization performance, outperforming traditional metrics like parameter count. By connecting this margin-based metric to quantum information theory, we demonstrate how to enhance the generalization performance of QML through a classical-quantum hybrid approach when applied to classical data. Quantum machine learning (QML) presents exciting opportunities to expand the horizons of machine learning beyond classical approaches. Generalization--the ability to learn from examples and make accurate predictions on unseen data--is a core component of intelligence and a critical factor that quantifies the effectiveness of machine learning models in real-world applications. Thus, fundamental challenge in QML, as in classical machine learning, is to understand, characterize, and optimize generalization. Generalization in QML has been studied through various factors, such as the number of parameters (Caro et al., 2022), effective dimension (Abbas et al., 2021), quantum resource theory Bu et al. (2021; 2022; 2023), and quantum information-theoretic quantities Banchi et al. (2021); Caro et al. (2023).