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Many experimental proposals for noisy intermediate scale quantum devices involve training a parameterized quantum circuit with a classical optimization loop. Such hybrid quantum-classical algorithms are popular for applications in quantum…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2019-02-04 Jarrod R. McClean , Sergio Boixo , Vadim N. Smelyanskiy , Ryan Babbush , Hartmut Neven

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) are expected to establish valuable applications on near-term quantum computers. However, recent works have pointed out that the performance of VQAs greatly relies on the expressibility of the ansatzes…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-08-15 Xia Liu , Geng Liu , Jiaxin Huang , Hao-Kai Zhang , Xin Wang

Machine learning algorithms, both in their classical and quantum versions, heavily rely on optimization algorithms based on gradients, such as gradient descent and alike. The overall performance is dependent on the appearance of local…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-04-26 Pablo Bermejo , Borja Aizpurua , Roman Orus

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…

Several architectures have been proposed for quantum neural networks (QNNs), with the goal of efficiently performing machine learning tasks on quantum data. Rigorous scaling results are urgently needed for specific QNN constructions to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-06-13 Kunal Sharma , M. Cerezo , Lukasz Cincio , Patrick J. Coles

Major obstacles remain to the implementation of macroscopic quantum computing: hardware problems of noise, decoherence, and scaling; software problems of error correction; and, most important, algorithm construction. Finding truly quantum…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2020-07-17 Nathan Thompson , James Steck , Elizabeth Behrman

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 supervised learning, utilizing variational circuits, stands out as a promising technology for NISQ devices due to its efficiency in hardware resource utilization during the creation of quantum feature maps and the implementation of…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-11-15 Anton Simen Albino , Rodrigo Bloot , Otto M. Pires , Erick G. S. Nascimento

Variational quantum algorithms are expected to demonstrate the advantage of quantum computing on near-term noisy quantum computers. However, training such variational quantum algorithms suffers from gradient vanishing as the size of the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-11-29 Anbang Wu , Gushu Li , Yufei Ding , Yuan Xie

Hybrid quantum-classical computing in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era with variational algorithms can exhibit barren plateau issues, causing difficult convergence of gradient-based optimization techniques. In this paper, we…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-04-08 Po-Wei Huang , Patrick Rebentrost

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

We define \emph{laziness} to describe a large suppression of variational parameter updates for neural networks, classical or quantum. In the quantum case, the suppression is exponential in the number of qubits for randomized variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Junyu Liu , Zexi Lin , Liang Jiang

We find that using neural networks to generate quantum states can effectively alleviate the barren plateau phenomenon present in random variational quantum circuits.

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-12-01 Zhehao Yi , Rahul Bhadani

Noise is typically treated as the adversary of quantum information processing. For open quantum dynamics, however, dissipation is part of the target physics, creating a tension with fault-tolerant architectures designed to suppress…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-29 Sameer Dambal , Michael AD Taylor , Yu Zhang

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

Quantum generative models provide inherently efficient sampling strategies and thus show promise for achieving an advantage using quantum hardware. In this work, we investigate the barriers to the trainability of quantum generative models…

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

We formalize a rigorous connection between barren plateaus (BP) in variational quantum algorithms and exponential concentration of quantum kernels for machine learning. Our results imply that recently proposed strategies to build BP-free…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-01-16 Pranav Kairon , Jonas Jäger , Roman V. Krems

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,…

Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) have emerged as pivotal strategies for attaining quantum advantage in diverse scientific and technological domains, notably within Quantum Neural Networks. However, despite their potential, VQAs…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-04-22 Lucas Friedrich , Tiago de Souza Farias , Jonas Maziero