Quenched Quantum Feature Maps

We propose a quantum feature mapping technique that leverages the quench dynamics of a quantum spin glass to extract complex data patterns at the quantum-advantage level for academic and industrial applications. We demonstrate that encoding a dataset information into disordered quantum many-body spin-glass problems, followed by a nonadiabatic evolution and feature extraction via measurements of expectation values, significantly enhances machine learning (ML) models. By analyzing the performance of our protocol over a range of evolution times, we empirically show that ML models benefit most from feature representations obtained in the fast coherent regime of a quantum annealer, particularly near the critical point of the quantum dynamics. We demonstrate the generalization of our technique by benchmarking on multiple high-dimensional datasets, involving over a hundred features, in applications including drug discovery and medical diagnostics. Moreover, we compare against a comprehensive suite of state-of-the-art classical ML models and show that our quantum feature maps can enhance the performance metrics of the baseline classical models up to 210%. Our work presents the first quantum ML demonstrations at the quantum-advantage level, bridging the gap between quantum supremacy and useful real-world academic and industrial applications.