Enhancing the expressivity of quantum neural networks with residual connections

Abstract

In noisy intermediate-scale quantum era, the research on the combination of artificial intelligence and quantum computing has been greatly developed. Here we propose a quantum circuit-based algorithm to implement quantum residual neural networks, where the residual connection channels are constructed by introducing auxiliary qubits to data-encoding and trainable blocks in quantum neural networks. We prove that when this particular network architecture is applied to a l-layer data-encoding, the number of frequency generation forms extends from one, namely the difference of the sum of generator eigenvalues, to $${{{{{{{\mathcal{O}}}}}}}}({l}^{2})$$ O ( l 2 ) , and the flexibility in adjusting Fourier coefficients can also be improved. It indicates that residual encoding can achieve better spectral richness and enhance the expressivity of various parameterized quantum circuits. Extensive numerical demonstrations in regression tasks and image classification are offered. Our work lays foundation for the complete quantum implementation of classical residual neural networks and offers a quantum feature map strategy for quantum machine learning.