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The barren plateau phenomenon, characterized by loss gradients that vanish exponentially with system size, poses a challenge to scaling variational quantum algorithms. Here we explore the potential of warm starts, whereby one initializes…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-03-04 Ricard Puig , Marc Drudis , Supanut Thanasilp , Zoë Holmes

Barren plateaus have emerged as a pivotal challenge for variational quantum computing. Our understanding of this phenomenon underwent a transformative shift with the recent introduction of a Lie algebraic theory capable of explaining most…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-10-19 N. L. Diaz , Diego García-Martín , Sujay Kazi , Martin Larocca , M. Cerezo

Variational quantum algorithms are viewed as promising candidates for demonstrating quantum advantage on near-term devices. These approaches typically involve the training of parameterized quantum circuits through a classical optimization…

Barren plateaus in variational quantum algorithms are typically described by gradient concentration at random initialization. In contrast, rigorous results for the Hessian, even at the level of entry-wise variance, remain limited. In this…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-02-11 Yihan Huang , Yangshuai Wang

The emergence of the Barren Plateau phenomenon poses a significant challenge to quantum machine learning. While most Barren Plateau analyses focus on single-qubit rotation gates, the gradient behavior of Parameterized Quantum Circuits built…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-02-06 Yuhan Yao , Yoshihiko Hasegawa

Variational quantum circuits characterise the state of a quantum system through the use of parameters that are optimised using classical optimisation procedures that typically rely on gradient information. The circuit-execution complexity…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-07-28 Sayantan Pramanik , Chaitanya Murti , M Girish Chandra

Bosonic continuous-variable Variational quantum circuits (VQCs) are crucial for information processing in cavity quantum electrodynamics and optical systems, widely applicable in quantum communication, sensing and error correction. The…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-10-17 Bingzhi Zhang , Quntao Zhuang

The Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) is a fundamental algorithm in quantum computing, yet a coherent geometric characterization of VQE remains missing due to fragmented analyses across fixed-ansatz and adaptive-circuit formulations. In…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-28 Zhen Qin

Barren plateaus, which means the training gradients become extremely small, pose a major challenge in optimizing parameterized quantum circuits, often making the learning process impractically slow or stall. This work shows why using neural…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-12-03 Zhehao Yi , Rahul Bhadani

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) promise efficient use of near-term quantum computers. However, training VQAs often requires an extensive amount of time and suffers from the barren plateau problem where the magnitude of the gradients…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-06-24 Tobias Haug , M. S. Kim

Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) have received considerable attention due to their potential for achieving near-term quantum advantage. However, more work is needed to understand their scalability. One known scaling result for VQAs is…

We prove upper and lower bounds relating the quantum gate complexity of a unitary operation, U, to the optimal control cost associated to the synthesis of U. These bounds apply for any optimal control problem, and can be used to show that…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2009-11-13 Michael A. Nielsen , Mark R. Dowling , Mile Gu , Andrew C. Doherty

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

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

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) have enabled a wide range of applications on near-term quantum devices. However, their scalability is fundamentally limited by barren plateaus, where the probability of encountering large gradients…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-07-22 Elias Zapusek , Ivan Rojkov , Florentin Reiter

Riemannian optimization is a principled framework for solving optimization problems where the desired optimum is constrained to a smooth manifold $\mathcal{M}$. Algorithms designed in this framework usually require some geometrical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-08 Boris Shustin , Haim Avron , Barak Sober

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

When the gate set has continuous parameters, synthesizing a unitary operator as a quantum circuit is always possible using exact methods, but finding minimal circuits efficiently remains a challenging problem. The landscape is very…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-01-07 Janani Gomathi , Alex Meiburg

We prove the existence of barren plateaus in variational quantum algorithms using linear optics with either bosonic or fermionic particles and demonstrate that fermionic linear optics is less susceptible to the barren plateau problem. We…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-04-21 Matthew D. Horner

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