The state-of-the-art machine learning approaches are based on classical von Neumann computing architectures and have been widely used in many industrial and academic domains. With the recent development of quantum computing, researchers and tech-giants have attempted new quantum circuits for machine learning tasks. However, the existing quantum computing platforms are hard to simulate classical deep learning models or problems because of the intractability of deep quantum circuits. Thus, it is necessary to design feasible quantum algorithms for quantum machine learning for noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) devices. This work explores variational quantum circuits for deep reinforcement learning. Specifically, we reshape classical deep reinforcement learning algorithms like experience replay and target network into a representation of variational quantum circuits. Moreover, we use a quantum information encoding scheme to reduce the number of model parameters compared to classical neural networks. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first proof-of-principle demonstration of variational quantum circuits to approximate the deep Q-value function for decision-making and policy-selection reinforcement learning with experience replay and target network. Besides, our variational quantum circuits can be deployed in many near-term NISQ machines.

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One of the major objectives of the experimental programs at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the discovery of new physics. This requires the identification of rare signals in immense backgrounds. Using machine learning algorithms greatly enhances our ability to achieve this objective. With the progress of quantum technologies, quantum machine learning could become a powerful tool

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We propose a novel decentralized feature extraction approach in federated learning to address privacy-preservation issues for speech recognition. It is built upon a quantum convolutional neural network (QCNN) composed of a quantum circuit encoder for feature extraction, and a recurrent neural network (RNN) based end-to-end acoustic model (AM). To enhance model parameter protection in a decentralized architecture, an input speech is first up-streamed to a quantum computing server to extract Mel-spectrogram, and the corresponding convolutional features are encoded using a quantum circuit algorithm with random parameters. The encoded features are then down-streamed to the local RNN model for the final recognition. The proposed decentralized framework takes advantage of the quantum learning progress to secure models and to avoid privacy leakage attacks. Testing on the Google Speech Commands Dataset, the proposed QCNN encoder attains a competitive accuracy of 95.12% in a decentralized model, which is better than the previous architectures using centralized RNN models with convolutional features. We conduct an in-depth study of different quantum circuit encoder architectures to provide insights into designing QCNNbased feature extractors. Neural saliency analyses demonstrate a high correlation between the proposed QCNN features, class activation maps, and the input Mel-spectrogram. We provide an implementation 1 for future studies.

Recent advance in classical reinforcement learning (RL) and quantum computation (QC) points to a promising direction of performing RL on a quantum computer. However, potential applications in quantum RL are limited by the number of qubits available in modern quantum devices. Here we present two frameworks of deep quantum RL tasks using a gradient-free evolution optimization: First, we apply the amplitude encoding scheme to the Cart-Pole problem, where we demonstrate the quantum advantage of parameter saving using the amplitude encoding; Second, we propose a hybrid framework where the quantum RL agents are equipped with a hybrid tensor network-variational quantum circuit (TN-VQC) architecture to handle inputs of dimensions exceeding the number of qubits. This allows us to perform quantum RL on the MiniGrid environment with 147-dimensional inputs. The hybrid TN-VQC architecture provides a natural way to perform efficient compression of the input dimension, enabling further quantum RL applications on noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.