Off-line quantum-advantage feature extraction for industrial production

Abstract

Quantum computing is no longer a lab curiosity for academic research. Industrial processors exceeding 100 qubits are commercially accessible and, for the first time, can extract information from data in ways that classical algorithms struggle to match. The most direct way to monetize this capability for industrial production today is quantum feature extraction: turning raw business data (images, customer records, molecules, or sensor readings) into richer representations that outperform standard machine learning models. There is one obstacle, however, that stands between today's demonstrations and tomorrow's production systems: every sample of data costs a quantum computing execution. For a company with millions of customers, satellite images, or transactions per month, processing every sample on quantum hardware is simply not viable. This work introduces quantum feature surrogates, a framework developed by Kipu Quantum that breaks this bottleneck. The idea is intuitive though challenging: instead of asking the quantum computer to look at every single sample, we let it look at a small, carefully chosen subsample of the data, whose distribution faithfully represents the full set. A simple classical model, a surrogate, then learns the quantum-induced patterns and applies them to the rest of the dataset at near-zero cost. The quantum processor stops being a per-sample engine and becomes a teacher of representations, while production inference runs entirely on classical hardware.