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Does provable absence of barren plateaus imply classical simulability?

11 Pith papers cite this work, alongside 37 external citations. Polarity classification is still indexing.

11 Pith papers citing it
37 external citations · Pith
abstract

A large amount of effort has recently been put into understanding the barren plateau phenomenon. In this perspective article, we face the increasingly loud elephant in the room and ask a question that has been hinted at by many but not explicitly addressed: Can the structure that allows one to avoid barren plateaus also be leveraged to efficiently simulate the loss classically? We collect evidence-on a case-by-case basis-that many commonly used models whose loss landscapes avoid barren plateaus can also admit classical simulation, provided that one can collect some classical data from quantum devices during an initial data acquisition phase. This follows from the observation that barren plateaus result from a curse of dimensionality, and that current approaches for solving them end up encoding the problem into some small, classically simulable, subspaces. Thus, while stressing that quantum computers can be essential for collecting data, our analysis sheds doubt on the information processing capabilities of many parametrized quantum circuits with provably barren plateau-free landscapes. We end by discussing the (many) caveats in our arguments including the limitations of average case arguments, the role of smart initializations, models that fall outside our assumptions, the potential for provably superpolynomial advantages and the possibility that, once larger devices become available, parametrized quantum circuits could heuristically outperform our analytic expectations.

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representative citing papers

Local tensor-train surrogates for quantum learning models

quant-ph · 2026-04-28 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Local tensor-train surrogates approximate quantum machine learning models via Taylor polynomials and tensor networks, delivering polynomial parameter scaling and explicit generalization bounds controlled by patch radius.

Trainability Beyond Linearity in Variational Quantum Objectives

quant-ph · 2026-04-20 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

The trainability boundary for variational quantum objectives is the affine regime; non-affine amplification-capable losses can mitigate barren plateaus when using coarse-grained statistics at polynomial widths.

Exponential quantum advantage in processing massive classical data

quant-ph · 2026-04-08 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

A polylog-sized quantum computer achieves exponential advantage over classical machines in classification and dimension reduction of massive classical data using quantum oracle sketching combined with classical shadows.

Resource-efficient equivariant quantum convolutional neural networks

quant-ph · 2024-10-02 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Equivariant sp-QCNN encodes general symmetries with group theory, splits circuits at pooling layers to preserve symmetry while enabling parallel measurements, and shows improved efficiency and trainability over standard equivariant QCNNs in noisy quantum data classification.

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