Quantum automated learning with provable and explainable trainability

Abstract

Machine learning is widely believed to be one of the most promising practical applications of quantum computing. Existing quantum machine learning schemes typically employ a quantum-classical hybrid approach that relies crucially on gradients of model parameters. Such an approach lacks provable convergence to global minima and will become infeasible as quantum learning models scale up. Here, we introduce quantum automated learning, where no variational parameter is involved and the training process is converted to quantum state preparation. In particular, we encode training data into unitary operations and iteratively evolve a random initial state under these unitaries and their inverses, with a target-oriented perturbation towards higher prediction accuracy sandwiched in between. Under reasonable assumptions, we rigorously prove that the evolution converges exponentially to the desired state corresponding to the global minimum of the loss function. We show that such a training process can be understood from the perspective of preparing quantum states by imaginary time evolution, where the data-encoded unitaries together with target-oriented perturbations would train the quantum learning model in an automated fashion. We further prove that the quantum automated learning paradigm features good generalization ability with the generalization error upper bounded by the ratio between a logarithmic function of the Hilbert space dimension and the number of training samples. In addition, we carry out extensive numerical simulations on real-life images and quantum data to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and validate the assumptions. Our results establish an unconventional quantum learning strategy that is gradient-free with provable and explainable trainability, which would be crucial for large-scale practical applications of quantum computing in machine learning scenarios.