pith. sign in

Barren plateaus in quantum neural network training landscapes

5 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

5 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Many experimental proposals for noisy intermediate scale quantum devices involve training a parameterized quantum circuit with a classical optimization loop. Such hybrid quantum-classical algorithms are popular for applications in quantum simulation, optimization, and machine learning. Due to its simplicity and hardware efficiency, random circuits are often proposed as initial guesses for exploring the space of quantum states. We show that the exponential dimension of Hilbert space and the gradient estimation complexity make this choice unsuitable for hybrid quantum-classical algorithms run on more than a few qubits. Specifically, we show that for a wide class of reasonable parameterized quantum circuits, the probability that the gradient along any reasonable direction is non-zero to some fixed precision is exponentially small as a function of the number of qubits. We argue that this is related to the 2-design characteristic of random circuits, and that solutions to this problem must be studied.

citation-role summary

background 2

citation-polarity summary

years

2026 4 2023 1

verdicts

UNVERDICTED 5

roles

background 2

polarities

background 2

representative citing papers

Evaluating quantum circuits in the reservoir computing paradigm

quant-ph · 2026-05-02 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

Brickwall quantum circuits with Haar-random, dual-unitary, and solvable two-qubit gates serve as effective reservoirs for temporal processing tasks, with performance correlated to circuit dynamics and validated on synthetic prediction benchmarks.

Hybrid Quantum-Classical Neural Architecture Search

quant-ph · 2026-05-18 · unverdicted · novelty 4.0

Demonstrates FLOPs-aware neural architecture search for hybrid quantum-classical neural networks to produce accurate yet computationally efficient models suitable for NISQ hardware.

citing papers explorer

Showing 5 of 5 citing papers.

  • Feasibility of performing quantum chemistry calculations on quantum computers quant-ph · 2023-06-05 · unverdicted · none · ref 28 · internal anchor

    New criteria reveal VQE needs fault-tolerant quantum computers due to decoherence and QPE has exponentially suppressed success probability from orthogonality catastrophe in classical input states.

  • QuanForge: A Mutation Testing Framework for Quantum Neural Networks cs.SE · 2026-04-22 · unverdicted · none · ref 39

    QuanForge introduces statistical mutation killing and nine post-training mutation operators for QNNs to distinguish test suites and localize vulnerable circuit regions.

  • Loss-aware state space geometry for quantum variational algorithms quant-ph · 2026-04-07 · unverdicted · none · ref 87

    Loss-aware natural gradient variants are introduced by embedding the loss hypersurface in a statistical manifold or using quantum state overlaps, yielding conformal updates that adjust effective step size.

  • Evaluating quantum circuits in the reservoir computing paradigm quant-ph · 2026-05-02 · unverdicted · none · ref 11

    Brickwall quantum circuits with Haar-random, dual-unitary, and solvable two-qubit gates serve as effective reservoirs for temporal processing tasks, with performance correlated to circuit dynamics and validated on synthetic prediction benchmarks.

  • Hybrid Quantum-Classical Neural Architecture Search quant-ph · 2026-05-18 · unverdicted · none · ref 24 · internal anchor

    Demonstrates FLOPs-aware neural architecture search for hybrid quantum-classical neural networks to produce accurate yet computationally efficient models suitable for NISQ hardware.