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Quantum Variational Circuits (QVCs) are often claimed as one of the most potent uses of both near term and long term quantum hardware. The standard approaches to optimizing these circuits rely on a classical system to compute the new…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-02-11 Owen Lockwood

Quantum machine learning holds the promise of combining the success of classical machine learning methods with the power of quantum computing, however one of the largest obstacles facing the field is the problem of barren plateaus.…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-11 Tiffany Duneau , Colin Krawchuk , Anna Pearson

In quantum optimal control theory the success of an optimization algorithm is highly influenced by how the figure of merit to be optimized behaves as a function of the control field, i.e. by the control landscape. Constraints on the control…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2016-04-07 Niklas Rach , Matthias M. Müller , Tommaso Calarco , Simone Montangero

There exist a number of reinforcement learning algorithms which learnby climbing the gradient of expected reward. Their long-runconvergence has been proved, even in partially observableenvironments with non-deterministic actions, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-14 Lex Weaver , Nigel Tao

The Quantum Alternating Operator Ansatz (QAOA) is a prominent variational quantum algorithm for solving combinatorial optimization problems. Its effectiveness depends on identifying input parameters that yield high-quality solutions.…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-10-10 Joel Rajakumar , John Golden , Andreas Bärtschi , Stephan Eidenbenz

Variational Quantum Algorithms are promising candidates for near-term quantum computing, yet they face scalability challenges due to barren plateaus, where gradients vanish exponentially relative to system size. Recent conjectures suggest…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-21 Sabri Meyer , Francesco Scala , Francesco Tacchino , Aurelien Lucchi

In the era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing, Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) have emerged as a promising approach for various applications, yet their training is often hindered by barren plateaus (BPs), where gradient…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-04-14 Jun Zhuang , Chaowen Guan

Variational quantum eigensolvers (VQEs) represent a powerful class of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms for computing molecular energies. Various numerical issues exist for these methods, however, including barren plateaus and large…

Exploiting the power of quantum computation to realise superior machine learning algorithmshas been a major research focus of recent years, but the prospects of quantum machine learning (QML) remain dampened by considerable technical…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-08-02 Maxwell T. West , Jamie Heredge , Martin Sevior , Muhammad Usman

Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) have been recently proposed as generalizations of classical neural networks to achieve the quantum speed-up. Despite the potential to outperform classical models, serious bottlenecks exist for training QNNs;…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2020-12-08 Kaining Zhang , Min-Hsiu Hsieh , Liu Liu , Dacheng Tao

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) combine the advantages of classical optimization and quantum computation, making them one of the most promising approaches in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. However, when optimized…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-11-20 Zhehao Yi , Rahul Bhadani

Gradient-based optimization is a key ingredient of variational quantum algorithms, with applications ranging from quantum machine learning to quantum chemistry and simulation. The parameter-shift rule provides a hardware-friendly method for…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-10-08 Leonardo Banchi , Dominic Branford , Chetan Waghela

Barren plateaus (BP), characterized by exponentially vanishing gradients that hinder the training of variational quantum circuits (VQC), present a pervasive and critical challenge in applying variational quantum algorithms to real-world…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-01-24 Yipei Liu , Yuhong Song , Jinyang Li , Qiang Guan , Cheng-chang Lu , Youzuo Lin , Weiwen Jiang

Advances in quantum algorithms suggest a tentative scaling advantage on certain combinatorial optimization problems. Recent work, however, has also reinforced the idea that barren plateaus render variational algorithms ineffective on large…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-03-14 Tim Bode , Krish Ramesh , Tobias Stollenwerk

Exploring quantum applications of near-term quantum devices is a rapidly growing field of quantum information science with both theoretical and practical interests. A leading paradigm to establish such near-term quantum applications is…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-08-16 Hao-Kai Zhang , Chengkai Zhu , Geng Liu , Xin Wang

Quantum neural networks (QNNs) have shown remarkable potential due to their capability of representing complex functions within exponentially large Hilbert spaces. However, their application to multivariate regression tasks has been…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-01-26 Jaemin Seo

The success of deep learning is due, to a large extent, to the remarkable effectiveness of gradient-based optimization methods applied to large neural networks. The purpose of this work is to propose a modern view and a general mathematical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-28 Chaoyue Liu , Libin Zhu , Mikhail Belkin

Training large neural networks (NNs) requires optimizing high-dimensional data-dependent loss functions. The optimization landscape of these functions is often highly complex and textured, even fractal-like, with many spurious local minima,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Mohammed Djameleddine Belgoumri , Mohamed Reda Bouadjenek , Hakim Hacid , Imran Razzak , Sunil Aryal

Quantum annealing has emerged as a promising approach for solving NP-hard optimization problems, leveraging quantum phenomena such as quantum tunneling to navigate complex energy landscapes. However, the extent to which quantum tunneling…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-02 Vishwajeet Ohal , Pierre Boulanger

Ground state preparation is classically intractable for general Hamiltonians. On quantum devices, shallow parameterized circuits can be effectively trained to obtain short-range entangled states under the paradigm of variational quantum…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-04-11 Hao-Kai Zhang , Shuo Liu , Shi-Xin Zhang