A co-design framework of neural networks and quantum circuits towards quantum advantage

Despite the pursuit of quantum advantages in various applications, the power of quantum computers in executing neural network has mostly remained unknown, primarily due to a missing tool that effectively designs a neural network suitable for quantum circuit. Here, we present a neural network and quantum circuit co-design framework, namely QuantumFlow, to address the issue. In QuantumFlow, we represent data as unitary matrices to exploit quantum power by encoding n = 2 k inputs into k qubits and representing data as random variables to seamlessly connect layers without measurement. Coupled with a novel algorithm, the cost complexity of the unitary matrices-based neural computation can be reduced from O ( n ) in classical computing to O ( p o l y l o g ( n )) in quantum computing. Results show that on MNIST dataset, QuantumFlow can achieve an accuracy of 94.09% with a cost reduction of 10.85 × against the classical computer. All these results demonstrate the potential for QuantumFlow to achieve the quantum advantage. The advantages coming from involving quantum systems in machine learning are still not fully clear. Here, the authors propose a software/hardware co-design framework towards quantum-friendly neural networks showing quantum advantage, representing data as either random variables or numbers in unitary matrices.