Gennaro De Luca | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Trainability of IQP Quantum Circuit Born Machines Under Gaussian Initialization

Quantum Circuit Born Machines (QCBMs) offer a natural approach to generative machine learning by leveraging the Born rule. Recent work has provided a method to classically train QCBMs with Instantaneous Quantum Polynomial (IQP) circuits via the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) loss. Despite the assumed intractability of sampling from IQP circuits classically, their expectation values can be computed classically, enabling training of these IQP QCBMs. However, quantum machine learning (QML) models have various other challenges, including trainability issues caused by exponential concentration or barren plateaus. While these issues have been explored for parameters sampled from a uniform distribution, little work has been done to rigorously treat the use of arbitrary Gaussian initialization schemes. This work leverages Stein's lemma and Lipschitz concentration bounds for Gaussian random variables to provide an analytical lower bound of the variance of the gradient and a probabilistic concentration bound of the deviation of the gradient from its mean. It discusses strategies to either avoid or encourage exponential concentration, as well as the conditions under which barren plateaus are more likely to occur.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Empirical Power of Quantum Encoding Methods for Binary Classification

Quantum machine learning is one of the many potential applications of quantum computing, each of which is hoped to provide some novel computational advantage. However, quantum machine learning applications often fail to outperform classical approaches on real-world classical data. The ability of these models to generalize well from few training data points is typically considered one of the few definitive advantages of this approach. In this work, we will instead focus on encoding schemes and their effects on various machine learning metrics. Specifically, we focus on real-world data encoding to demonstrate differences between quantum encoding strategies for several real-world datasets and the classification model standard, LightGBM. In particular, we apply the following encoding strategies, including three standard approaches and two modified approaches: Angle, Amplitude, IQP, Entangled Angle, and Alternative IQP. As these approaches require either a significant number of qubits or gates to encode larger datasets, we perform feature selection to support the limited computing power of quantum simulators. This feature selection is performed through a quantum annealing enhanced approach that builds on a QUBO formulation of the problem. In this work, we provide a preliminary demonstration that quantum machine learning with the IQP encoding and LightGBM produce statistically equivalent results for a large majority of the assigned learning tasks.

quant-ph↗