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The training of a parameterized model largely depends on the landscape of the underlying loss function. In particular, vanishing gradients are a central bottleneck in the scalability of variational quantum algorithms (VQAs), and are known…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-09-26 Alistair Letcher , Stefan Woerner , Christa Zoufal

In this paper, we propose a general scheme to analyze the gradient vanishing phenomenon, also known as the barren plateau phenomenon, in training quantum neural networks with the ZX-calculus. More precisely, we extend the barren plateaus…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-06-09 Chen Zhao , Xiao-Shan Gao

The existence of barren plateaus has recently revealed new training challenges in quantum machine learning (QML). Uncovering the mechanisms behind barren plateaus is essential in understanding the scope of problems that QML can efficiently…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-02-08 Roy J. Garcia , Chen Zhao , Kaifeng Bu , Arthur Jaffe

Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) may be a path to quantum advantage on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers. A natural question is whether noise on NISQ devices places fundamental limitations on VQA performance. We…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-03-05 Samson Wang , Enrico Fontana , M. Cerezo , Kunal Sharma , Akira Sone , Lukasz Cincio , Patrick J. Coles

Despite its popularity, several empirical and theoretical studies suggest that the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) has persistent issues in providing a substantial practical advantage. Numerical results for few qubits and…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-10-15 Gereon Koßmann , Lennart Binkowski , Lauritz van Luijk , Timo Ziegler , René Schwonnek

In recent years, variational quantum circuits (VQCs) have been widely explored to advance quantum circuits against classic models on various domains, such as quantum chemistry and quantum machine learning. Similar to classic…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-02-11 Jack Cunningham , Jun Zhuang

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…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2019-12-11 Edward Grant , Leonard Wossnig , Mateusz Ostaszewski , Marcello Benedetti

Training neural networks requires significant computational resources and energy. Methods like mixed-precision and quantization-aware training reduce bit usage, yet they still depend heavily on computationally expensive gradient-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Noa Cohen , Omkar Joglekar , Dotan Di Castro , Vladimir Tchuiev , Shir Kozlovsky , Michal Moshkovitz

The barren plateau phenomenon; where cost function gradients vanish exponentially with system size; remains a fundamental obstacle to training variational quantum circuits (VQCs) at scale. We demonstrate, both theoretically and numerically,…

Quantum machine learning has become an area of growing interest but has certain theoretical and hardware-specific limitations. Notably, the problem of vanishing gradients, or barren plateaus, renders the training impossible for circuits…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-08-31 Mo Kordzanganeh , Pavel Sekatski , Leonid Fedichkin , Alexey Melnikov

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) optimize the parameters $\vec{\theta}$ of a parametrized quantum circuit $V(\vec{\theta})$ to minimize a cost function $C$. While VQAs may enable practical applications of noisy quantum computers, they…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-03-23 M. Cerezo , Akira Sone , Tyler Volkoff , Lukasz Cincio , Patrick J. Coles

Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) are becoming the primary computational primitive for next-generation quantum computers, particularly those embedded as resource-constrained accelerators in the emerging Quantum Internet of Things…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-12-05 Ratun Rahman , Dinh C. Nguyen

Variational quantum computing offers a flexible computational paradigm with applications in diverse areas. However, a key obstacle to realizing their potential is the Barren Plateau (BP) phenomenon. When a model exhibits a BP, its parameter…

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) have emerged as a leading paradigm in near-term quantum computing, yet their performance can be hindered by the so-called barren plateau problem, where gradients vanish exponentially with system size or…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-08-27 Yifeng Peng , Xinyi Li , Zhemin Zhang , Samuel Yen-Chi Chen , Zhiding Liang , Ying Wang

Scaling of variational quantum algorithms to large problem sizes requires efficient optimization of random parameterized quantum circuits. For such circuits with uncorrelated parameters, the presence of exponentially vanishing gradients in…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-01-28 Tyler Volkoff , Patrick J. Coles

Parameterized quantum circuits used as variational ans\"atze are emerging as promising tools to tackle complex problems ranging from quantum chemistry to combinatorial optimization. These variational quantum circuits can suffer from the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-12-14 Valentin Heyraud , Zejian Li , Kaelan Donatella , Alexandre Le Boité , Cristiano Ciuti

Quantum neural networks (QNNs) are a framework for creating quantum algorithms that promises to combine the speedups of quantum computation with the widespread successes of machine learning. A major challenge in QNN development is a…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-06-18 Maria Kieferova , Ortiz Marrero Carlos , Nathan Wiebe

The variational quantum algorithm (VQA) with a parametrized quantum circuit is widely applicable to near-term quantum computing, but its fundamental issues that limit optimization performance have been reported in the literature. For…

Quantum algorithms based on parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) have enabled a wide range of applications on near-term quantum devices. However, existing PQC architectures face several challenges, among which the ``barren plateaus"…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-01-09 Zhenyu Chen , Yuguo Shao , Zhengwei Liu , Zhaohui Wei

Classical optimization of parameterized quantum circuits is a widely studied methodology for the preparation of complex quantum states, as well as the solution of machine learning and optimization problems. However, it is well known that…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-07-18 Abhinav Deshpande , Marcel Hinsche , Khadijeh Najafi , Kunal Sharma , Ryan Sweke , Christa Zoufal