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Out-of-distribution generalization for learning quantum dynamics

Quantum Physics 2023-07-11 v3 Machine Learning Machine Learning

Abstract

Generalization bounds are a critical tool to assess the training data requirements of Quantum Machine Learning (QML). Recent work has established guarantees for in-distribution generalization of quantum neural networks (QNNs), where training and testing data are drawn from the same data distribution. However, there are currently no results on out-of-distribution generalization in QML, where we require a trained model to perform well even on data drawn from a different distribution to the training distribution. Here, we prove out-of-distribution generalization for the task of learning an unknown unitary. In particular, we show that one can learn the action of a unitary on entangled states having trained only product states. Since product states can be prepared using only single-qubit gates, this advances the prospects of learning quantum dynamics on near term quantum hardware, and further opens up new methods for both the classical and quantum compilation of quantum circuits.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.10268,
  title  = {Out-of-distribution generalization for learning quantum dynamics},
  author = {Matthias C. Caro and Hsin-Yuan Huang and Nicholas Ezzell and Joe Gibbs and Andrew T. Sornborger and Lukasz Cincio and Patrick J. Coles and Zoë Holmes},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.10268},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

8 pages (main body) + 18 pages (references and appendix); 4+2 figures; V3 includes additional explanations and numerical experiments in the appendix

R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:55:01.666Z