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An initialization strategy for addressing barren plateaus in parametrized quantum circuits

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arxiv 1903.05076 v3 pith:GMJAJEJQ submitted 2019-03-12 quant-ph

An initialization strategy for addressing barren plateaus in parametrized quantum circuits

classification quant-ph
keywords barrenquantumcircuitsinitializationparameterstrategyvaluesempirically
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Parametrized quantum circuits initialized with random initial parameter values are characterized by barren plateaus where the gradient becomes exponentially small in the number of qubits. In this technical note we theoretically motivate and empirically validate an initialization strategy which can resolve the barren plateau problem for practical applications. The technique involves randomly selecting some of the initial parameter values, then choosing the remaining values so that the circuit is a sequence of shallow blocks that each evaluates to the identity. This initialization limits the effective depth of the circuits used to calculate the first parameter update so that they cannot be stuck in a barren plateau at the start of training. In turn, this makes some of the most compact ans\"atze usable in practice, which was not possible before even for rather basic problems. We show empirically that variational quantum eigensolvers and quantum neural networks initialized using this strategy can be trained using a gradient based method.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Trainability Beyond Linearity in Variational Quantum Objectives

    quant-ph 2026-04 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.

  2. Learning to learn with quantum neural networks via classical neural networks

    quant-ph 2019-07 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Classical RNNs trained on small instances provide parameter initializations for QAOA and VQE that reduce total optimization iterations and generalize across problem sizes.

  3. Lie-Algebraic Subspace Quantization for Zero-Shot Quantum Learning and Barren-Plateau Mitigation

    quant-ph 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.5

    Classical residual weights can be compiled into subspace quantum generators with a two-term error bound, enabling zero-shot transfer and initialization-time barren-plateau mitigation.

  4. Quantum computation at the edge of chaos

    quant-ph 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Topological entanglement entropy regularizes variational quantum algorithms to enforce quantum sparsity and operate at the edge of chaos for better trainability.