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We investigate the barren plateau (BP) phenomenon in variational quantum algorithms using a statistical approach. Using Gaussian function models, we identify three distinct types of BPs. The first type, which we called localized-dip BPs,…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-08-13 Le Bin Ho , Jesus Urbaneja , Sahel Ashhab

Parameterized quantum circuits serve as ans\"{a}tze for solving variational problems and provide a flexible paradigm for programming near-term quantum computers. Ideally, such ans\"{a}tze should be highly expressive so that a close…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-03-31 Zoë Holmes , Kunal Sharma , M. Cerezo , Patrick J. Coles

Quantum Boltzmann machines (QBMs) are generative models with potential advantages in quantum machine learning, yet their training is fundamentally limited by the barren plateau problem, where gradients vanish exponentially with system size.…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-06 Takeshi Kimura , Kohtaro Kato , Masahito Hayashi

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

Quantum generative models exploit quantum superposition and entanglement to enhance learning efficiency for both classical and quantum data. Recently, inspired by classical diffusion frameworks, the quantum denoising diffusion probabilistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Haipeng Cao , Kaining Zhang , Dacheng Tao , Zhaofeng Su

A large ongoing research effort focuses on Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs), representing leading candidates to achieve computational speed-ups on current quantum devices. The scalability of VQAs to a large number of qubits, beyond the…

Variational quantum algorithms are promising candidates for near-term quantum computing but can be hindered by barren plateaus, where gradients vanish exponentially and optimization becomes intractable. Noise-Induced Barren Plateaus (NIBP)…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-10 Sebastian Schmitt , Linus Ekstrøm , Alberto Bottarelli , Xavier Bonet-Monroig

Barren plateaus are fundamentally a statement about quantum loss landscapes on average but there can, and generally will, exist patches of barren plateau landscapes with substantial gradients. Previous work has studied certain classes of…

Hybrid quantum-classical variational algorithms are one of the most propitious implementations of quantum computing on near-term devices, offering classical machine learning support to quantum scale solution spaces. However, numerous…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-07-28 Taylor L. Patti , Khadijeh Najafi , Xun Gao , Susanne F. Yelin

We argue that an excess in entanglement between the visible and hidden units in a Quantum Neural Network can hinder learning. In particular, we show that quantum neural networks that satisfy a volume-law in the entanglement entropy will…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-03-11 Carlos Ortiz Marrero , Mária Kieferová , Nathan Wiebe

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

Quantum computing is currently strongly limited by the impact of noise, in particular introduced by the application of two-qubit gates. For this reason, reducing the number of two-qubit gates is of paramount importance on noisy…

Variational quantum computing offers a powerful framework with applications across diverse fields such as quantum chemistry, machine learning, and optimization. However, its scalability is hindered by the exponential concentration of the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-05-05 Giulio Crognaletti , Michele Grossi , Angelo Bassi

Variational Quantum Circuits are being used as versatile Quantum Machine Learning models. Some empirical results exhibit an advantage in supervised and generative learning tasks. However, when applied to Reinforcement Learning, less is…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-01-18 André Sequeira , Luis Paulo Santos , Luís Soares Barbosa

Two main challenges preventing efficient training of variational quantum algorithms and quantum machine learning models are local minima and barren plateaus. Typically, barren plateaus are associated with deep circuits, while shallow…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-02-10 Nikita A. Nemkov , Evgeniy O. Kiktenko , Aleksey K. Fedorov

Quantum neural networks (QNNs) offer a powerful paradigm for programming near-term quantum computers and have the potential to speedup applications ranging from data science to chemistry to materials science. However, a possible obstacle to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-06-08 M. Cerezo , Patrick J. Coles

Training deep quantum neural networks (QNNs) for image classification is notoriously difficult due to vanishing gradients (barren plateaus) and limited nonlinearity in purely unitary circuits. We propose a novel gradient-free…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-05-09 Yichen Xie

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

We prove that using global observables to train the matrix product state ansatz results in the vanishing of all partial derivatives, also known as barren plateaus, while using local observables avoids this. This ansatz is widely used in…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-06-23 Afrad Basheer , Yuan Feng , Christopher Ferrie , Sanjiang Li , Hakop Pashayan

Variational quantum algorithms represent a powerful approach for solving optimization problems on noisy quantum computers, with a broad spectrum of potential applications ranging from chemistry to machine learning. However, their…