Modeling quantum neural network gradient with reinforcement learning

Abstract

Training quantum neural networks (QNNs) on near-term hardware remains hampered by two compounding difficulties: the exponential vanishing of gradient variance known as the barren plateau, and the $\mathcal{O}(L \cdot 2^n)$ time and memory cost of differentiating through an $n$-qubit, $L$-layer circuit. We propose RLQ-Grad, a reinforcement-learning-based optimizer in which a classical policy $π_ϕ$ (a spectrally-normalized PPO agent) learns to propose parameter updates directly, conditioned on the QNN's current parameters, loss, accuracy, and previous update. Because the surrogate gradient is emitted by a classical network rather than obtained by differentiating through the unitary $U(θ)$, its variance is not constrained by the barren plateau concentration bound, and its cost scales with the number of trainable parameters rather than the Hilbert-space dimension. We prove these properties formally and verify them on a hardware-efficient ansatz across four supervised benchmarks with up to $n=20$ qubits. RLQ-Grad preserves a near-flat gradient-variance curve where backpropagation, parameter-shift, and adjoint differentiation decay by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude. Accounting for the full training pipeline (PPO rollouts, actor-critic updates, and optimizer states), RLQ-Grad needs under 2 MB of memory and runs $2490\times$, $7876\times$, and $673\times$ faster per iteration than these three methods at $n=20$. It improves top-1 accuracy by up to $+10\%$ over gradient-based baselines on circuits of up to 12 qubits, and matches dedicated barren plateau mitigation methods on CIFAR-10 at 14 to 20 qubits, where evolutionary and gradient-free optimizers collapse to chance.