Quantum Computing in ML: Perspectives from Research and Business

Washington Quantum Computing Meetup – Saturday April 10th 12.00pm EDT

Tamer and Manuel will discuss current trends and research directions in QML with some business applications. They will talk broadly about Zapata’s efforts in the field and the specialized tools they are building, and then focus on a specific example from recently published result where quantum techniques are applied Generative Adversarial Networks. Generating high-quality data (images/video) is one of the most exciting and challenging frontiers in unsupervised machine learning. Utilizing quantum computers in such tasks to potentially enhance conventional machine learning algorithms has emerged as a promising application, but poses big challenges due to the limited number of qubits and the level of gate noise in available devices.

In this work, we provide the first practical and experimental implementation of a quantum-classical generative algorithm capable of generating high-resolution images of handwritten digits with state-of-the-art gate-based quantum computers. In our quantum-assisted machine learning framework, we implement a quantum-circuit based generative model to learn and sample the prior distribution of a Generative Adversarial Network.

We introduce a multi-basis technique which leverages the unique possibility of measuring quantum states in different bases, hence enhancing the expressibility of the prior distribution. We train this hybrid algorithm on an ion-trap device based on 171Yb+ ion qubits to generate high-quality images and quantitatively outperform comparable classical Generative Adversarial Networks trained on the popular MNIST data set for handwritten digits.

Bio:
Manuel studied Physics at the University of Heidelberg in[masked] and graduated with a Master’s degree. He did his Master thesis, Exploring and Benchmarking Quantum-assisted Neural Networks with Qubit Layers, in collaboration with the Honda Research Institute Europe in Frankfurt. After graduating, he started an internship at Zapata and recently joined as a Quantum Application Scientist for quantum machine learning and generative modelling.

Tamer is a physicist with a background in both industry and academia. He studied galaxy clusters and cosmology for his doctoral thesis at MIT, before joining Hewlett Packard in a consulting role in enterprise software. He then returned to physics, taking an assistant professor position at the Zewail City for Science and Technology, in Egypt. He has turned his focus now to quantum computing with Zapata Computing where he aims to combine his physics, computing and consulting skills.

Dr. Rafael Sotelo is the Co-Founder of Quantum South.
Pawel Gora is the CEO of Quantum AI Foundation.
Dr. Terrill Frantz is a professor of Harrisburg University.