Quantum Generative Diffusion Model: A Fully Quantum-Mechanical Model for Generating Quantum State Ensemble

Classical diffusion models have shown superior generative results. Exploring them in the quantum domain can advance the field of quantum generative learning. This work introduces Quantum Generative Diffusion Model (QGDM) as their simple and elegant quantum counterpart. Through a non-unitary forward process, any target quantum state can be transformed into a completely mixed state that has the highest entropy and maximum uncertainty about the system. A trainable backward process is used to recover the former from the latter. The design requirements for its backward process includes non-unitarity and small parameter count. We introduce partial trace operations to enforce non-unitary and reduce the number of trainable parameters by using a parameter-sharing strategy and incorporating temporal information as an input in the backward process. We present QGDM's resource-efficient version to reduce auxiliary qubits while preserving generative capabilities. QGDM exhibits faster convergence than Quantum Generative Adversarial Network (QGAN) because its adopted convex-based optimization can result in better convergence. The results of comparing it with QGAN demonstrate its effectiveness in generating both pure and mixed quantum states. It can achieve 53.02% higher fidelity in mixed-state generation than QGAN. The results highlight its great potential to tackle challenging quantum generation tasks.