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Exact gradients for linear optics with single photons

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arxiv 2409.16369 v2 pith:DKHSNYBT submitted 2024-09-24 quant-ph stat.ML

Exact gradients for linear optics with single photons

classification quant-ph stat.ML
keywords parameterlinearnumberphotonssystemscircuitsgeneralizedgradients
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Though parameter shift rules have drastically improved gradient estimation methods for several types of quantum circuits, leading to improved performance in downstream tasks, so far they have not been transferable to linear optics with single photons. In this work, we derive an analytical formula for the gradients in these circuits with respect to phaseshifters via a generalized parameter shift rule, where the number of parameter shifts depends linearly on the total number of photons. Experimentally, this enables access to derivatives in photonic systems without the need for finite difference approximations. Building on this, we propose two strategies through which one can reduce the number of shifts in the expression, and hence reduce the overall sample complexity. Numerically, we show that this generalized parameter-shift rule can converge to the minimum of a cost function with fewer parameter update steps than alternative techniques. We anticipate that this method will open up new avenues to solving optimization problems with photonic systems, as well as provide new techniques for the experimental characterization and control of linear optical systems.

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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. Coherent-State Propagation: A Computational Framework for Simulating Bosonic Quantum Systems

    quant-ph 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 8.0

    Coherent-state propagation enables quasi-polynomial classical simulation of bosonic circuits with logarithmically many Kerr gates at exponentially small trace-distance error, with polynomial runtime in the weak-nonlin...

  2. The trainability of photonic quantum circuits

    quant-ph 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Fixed-order photon-number polynomial observables make passive linear-optical variational circuits trainable with polynomially many samples, while output-probability and high-order observables are exponentially hard to train.

  3. Mitigating the barren plateau problem in linear optics

    quant-ph 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A dual-valued phase shifter in linear optics creates variational cost landscapes with fewer local minima and outperforms prior linear-optical variational algorithms by mitigating barren plateaus.

  4. Parameter-Shift Rules for Gradients in Boson Sampling Experiments

    quant-ph 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

    Lossy Fock boson sampling probabilities are finite Fourier series in each phase, so their exact gradients can be recovered from shifted photon-count measurements; Gaussian boson sampling under general loss admits no s...