Energetic Cost of Temporal Information Processing in Quantum Reservoirs
Quantum reservoir computing offers a promising route toward energy-efficient machine learning by processing temporal information with minimal training overhead. Yet, the physical principles linking its energetic cost to computational performance remain largely unexplored. Here we show that, in an interacting spin reservoir, information encoding and information processing are governed by distinct physical mechanisms. In the weak interacting regime, we derive an analytical expression for the average (switching) work, showing that the energetic cost of encoding new inputs is determined by the local response of the reservoir units. In contrast, interactions primarily redistribute the encoded information, generating memory and nonlinear features while only weakly affecting the work. This separation produces opposite correlations between energetic cost and performance for representative linear and nonlinear benchmark tasks. Our results identify the switching work as the energetic signature of information encoding and clarify when energetic efficiency and computational performance are compatible.