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Variational quantum algorithms rely on gradient based optimization to iteratively minimize a cost function evaluated by measuring output(s) of a quantum processor. A barren plateau is the phenomenon of exponentially vanishing gradients in…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-10-26 Alexey Uvarov , Jacob Biamonte

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

Variational quantum eigensolver (VQE), aiming at determining the ground state energy of a quantum system described by a Hamiltonian on noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) devices, is among the most significant applications of…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-04-12 Ze-Tong Li , Fan-Xu Meng , Han Zeng , Zai-Chen Zhang , Xu-Tao Yu

One of the most important properties of classical neural networks is how surprisingly trainable they are, though their training algorithms typically rely on optimizing complicated, nonconvex loss functions. Previous results have shown that…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-12-16 Eric R. Anschuetz , Bobak T. Kiani

The barren plateau phenomenon is one of the main obstacles to implementing variational quantum algorithms in the current generation of quantum processors. Here, we introduce a method capable of avoiding the barren plateau phenomenon in the…

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

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

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) are widely applied in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum era and are expected to demonstrate quantum advantage. However, training VQAs faces difficulties, one of which is the so-called barren plateaus…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-02-07 Huan-Yu Liu , Tai-Ping Sun , Yu-Chun Wu , Yong-Jian Han , Guo-Ping Guo

Quantum neural networks (QNNs) have generated excitement around the possibility of efficiently analyzing quantum data. But this excitement has been tempered by the existence of exponentially vanishing gradients, known as barren plateau…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-11-02 Arthur Pesah , M. Cerezo , Samson Wang , Tyler Volkoff , Andrew T. Sornborger , Patrick J. Coles

A new paradigm for data science has emerged, with quantum data, quantum models, and quantum computational devices. This field, called Quantum Machine Learning (QML), aims to achieve a speedup over traditional machine learning for data…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-05-24 Supanut Thanasilp , Samson Wang , Nhat A. Nghiem , Patrick J. Coles , M. Cerezo

Variational quantum algorithms is one of the most representative algorithms in quantum computing, which has a wide range of applications in quantum machine learning, quantum simulation and other related fields. However, they face challenges…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-02-22 Xiao Shi , Yun Shang

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

Variational quantum algorithms are promising algorithms for achieving quantum advantage on near-term devices. The quantum hardware is used to implement a variational wave function and measure observables, whereas the classical computer is…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-07-01 Stefan H. Sack , Raimel A. Medina , Alexios A. Michailidis , Richard Kueng , Maksym Serbyn

Barren Plateaus are a formidable challenge for hybrid quantum-classical algorithms that lead to flat plateaus in the loss function landscape making it difficult to take advantage of the expressive power of parameterized quantum circuits…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-06-21 Michelle Gelman

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

We introduce a novel approach to variational Quantum algorithms (VQA) via continuous bandits. VQA are a class of hybrid Quantum-classical algorithms where the parameters of Quantum circuits are optimized by classical algorithms. Previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Marc Wanner , Johan Jonasson , Emil Carlsson , Devdatt Dubhashi

Dynamical Lie algebras (DLAs) have emerged as a valuable tool in the study of parameterized quantum circuits, helping to characterize both their expressiveness and trainability. In particular, the absence or presence of barren plateaus…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-28 Jonathan Allcock , Miklos Santha , Pei Yuan , Shengyu Zhang

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

This paper presents an easy-to-implement approach to mitigate the challenges posed by barren plateaus (BPs) in randomly initialized parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) within variational quantum algorithms (VQAs). Recent state-of-the-art…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-12-10 Muhammad Kashif , Muhammad Shafique

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