No Arabic abstract
Over the past few years several quantum machine learning algorithms were proposed that promise quantum speed-ups over their classical counterparts. Most of these learning algorithms either assume quantum access to data -- making it unclear if quantum speed-ups still exist without making these strong assumptions, or are heuristic in nature with no provable advantage over classical algorithms. In this paper, we establish a rigorous quantum speed-up for supervised classification using a general-purpose quantum learning algorithm that only requires classical access to data. Our quantum classifier is a conventional support vector machine that uses a fault-tolerant quantum computer to estimate a kernel function. Data samples are mapped to a quantum feature space and the kernel entries can be estimated as the transition amplitude of a quantum circuit. We construct a family of datasets and show that no classical learner can classify the data inverse-polynomially better than random guessing, assuming the widely-believed hardness of the discrete logarithm problem. Meanwhile, the quantum classifier achieves high accuracy and is robust against additive errors in the kernel entries that arise from finite sampling statistics.
Increasing demand for algorithms that can learn quickly and efficiently has led to a surge of development within the field of artificial intelligence (AI). An important paradigm within AI is reinforcement learning (RL), where agents interact with environments by exchanging signals via a communication channel. Agents can learn by updating their behaviour based on obtained feedback. The crucial question for practical applications is how fast agents can learn to respond correctly. An essential figure of merit is therefore the learning time. While various works have made use of quantum mechanics to speed up the agents decision-making process, a reduction in learning time has not been demonstrated yet. Here we present a RL experiment where the learning of an agent is boosted by utilizing a quantum communication channel with the environment. We further show that the combination with classical communication enables the evaluation of such an improvement, and additionally allows for optimal control of the learning progress. This novel scenario is therefore demonstrated by considering hybrid agents, that alternate between rounds of quantum and classical communication. We implement this learning protocol on a compact and fully tunable integrated nanophotonic processor. The device interfaces with telecom-wavelength photons and features a fast active feedback mechanism, allowing us to demonstrate the agents systematic quantum advantage in a setup that could be readily integrated within future large-scale quantum communication networks.
Design of new experiments, as well as upgrade of ongoing ones, is a continuous process in the experimental high energy physics. Since the best solution is a trade-off between different kinds of limitations, a quick turn over is necessary to evaluate physics performance for different techniques in different configurations. Two typical problems which slow down evaluation of physics performance for particular approaches to calorimeter detector technologies and configurations are: - Emulating particular detector properties including raw detector response together with a signal processing chain to adequately simulate a calorimeter response for different signal and background conditions. This includes combining detector properties obtained from the general Geant simulation with properties obtained from different kinds of bench and beam tests of detector and electronics prototypes. - Building an adequate reconstruction algorithm for physics reconstruction of the detector response which is reasonably tuned to extract the most of the performance provided by the given detector configuration. Being approached from the first principles, both problems require significant development efforts. Fortunately, both problems may be addressed by using modern machine learning approaches, that allow a combination of available details of the detector techniques into corresponding higher level physics performance in a semi-automated way. In this paper, we discuss the use of advanced machine learning techniques to speed up and improve the precision of the detector development and optimisation cycle, with an emphasis on the experience and practical results obtained by applying this approach to epitomising the electromagnetic calorimeter design as a part of the upgrade project for the LHCb detector at LHC.
State-of-the-art classical neural networks are observed to be vulnerable to small crafted adversarial perturbations. A more severe vulnerability has been noted for quantum machine learning (QML) models classifying Haar-random pure states. This stems from the concentration of measure phenomenon, a property of the metric space when sampled probabilistically, and is independent of the classification protocol. In order to provide insights into the adversarial robustness of a quantum classifier on real-world classification tasks, we focus on the adversarial robustness in classifying a subset of encoded states that are smoothly generated from a Gaussian latent space. We show that the vulnerability of this task is considerably weaker than that of classifying Haar-random pure states. In particular, we find only mildly polynomially decreasing robustness in the number of qubits, in contrast to the exponentially decreasing robustness when classifying Haar-random pure states and suggesting that QML models can be useful for real-world classification tasks.
We present a collision model for the charging of a quantum battery by identical nonequilibrium qubit units. When the units are prepared in a mixture of energy eigenstates, the energy gain in the battery can be described by a classical random walk, where both average energy and variance grow linearly with time. Conversely, when the qubits contain quantum coherence, interference effects buildup in the battery and lead to a faster spreading of the energy distribution, reminiscent of a quantum random walk. This can be exploited for faster and more efficient charging of a battery initialized in the ground state. Specifically, we show that coherent protocols can yield higher charging power than any possible incoherent strategy, demonstrating a quantum speed-up at the level of a single battery. Finally, we characterize the amount of extractable work from the battery through the notion of ergotropy.
We operate a superconducting quantum processor consisting of two tunable transmon qubits coupled by a swapping interaction, and equipped with non destructive single-shot readout of the two qubits. With this processor, we run the Grover search algorithm among four objects and find that the correct answer is retrieved after a single run with a success probability between 0.52 and 0.67, significantly larger than the 0.25 achieved with a classical algorithm. This constitutes a proof-of-concept for the quantum speed-up of electrical quantum processors.