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An important application for near-term quantum computing lies in optimization tasks, with applications ranging from quantum chemistry and drug discovery to machine learning. In many settings --- most prominently in so-called parametrized or…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2019-03-27 Maria Schuld , Ville Bergholm , Christian Gogolin , Josh Izaac , Nathan Killoran

Barren plateau landscapes correspond to gradients that vanish exponentially in the number of qubits. Such landscapes have been demonstrated for variational quantum algorithms and quantum neural networks with either deep circuits or global…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-10-06 Andrew Arrasmith , M. Cerezo , Piotr Czarnik , Lukasz Cincio , Patrick J. Coles

We analyze the barren plateau phenomenon in the variational optimization of quantum circuits inspired by matrix product states (qMPS), tree tensor networks (qTTN), and the multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz (qMERA). We consider…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-04-14 Enrique Cervero Martín , Kirill Plekhanov , Michael Lubasch

Variational quantum-classical hybrid algorithms are seen as a promising strategy for solving practical problems on quantum computers in the near term. While this approach reduces the number of qubits and operations required from the quantum…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-03-07 Ali Rad , Alireza Seif , Norbert M. Linke

Variational Quantum Circuits (VQCs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for quantum machine learning in the NISQ era. While parameter sharing in VQCs can reduce the parameter space dimensionality and potentially mitigate the barren plateau…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Gerhard Stenzel , Tobias Rohe , Michael Kölle , Leo Sünkel , Jonas Stein , Claudia Linnhoff-Popien

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,…

Quantum machine learning has emerged as a promising utilization of near-term quantum computation devices. However, algorithmic classes such as variational quantum algorithms have been shown to suffer from barren plateaus due to vanishing…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-01-23 Lukas Broers , Ludwig Mathey

Scaling of variational quantum algorithms to large problem sizes requires efficient optimization of random parameterized quantum circuits. For such circuits with uncorrelated parameters, the presence of exponentially vanishing gradients in…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-01-28 Tyler Volkoff , Patrick J. Coles

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) optimize the parameters $\vec{\theta}$ of a parametrized quantum circuit $V(\vec{\theta})$ to minimize a cost function $C$. While VQAs may enable practical applications of noisy quantum computers, they…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-03-23 M. Cerezo , Akira Sone , Tyler Volkoff , Lukasz Cincio , Patrick J. Coles

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

Quantifying the flatness of the objective-function landscape associated with unstructured parameterized quantum circuits is important for understanding the performance of variational algorithms utilizing a "hardware-efficient ansatz",…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-03-14 John Napp

Variational quantum circuits have been widely employed in quantum simulation and quantum machine learning in recent years. However, quantum circuits with random structures have poor trainability due to the exponentially vanishing gradient…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-02-20 Kaining Zhang , Liu Liu , Min-Hsiu Hsieh , Dacheng Tao

Variational Quantum Algorithms are a vital part of quantum computing. It is a blend of quantum and classical methods for tackling tough problems in machine learning, chemistry, and combinatorial optimization. Yet as these algorithms scale…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-19 Francis Boabang , Samuel Asante Gyamerah

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

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…

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

Quantum neural networks (QNNs) are a framework for creating quantum algorithms that promises to combine the speedups of quantum computation with the widespread successes of machine learning. A major challenge in QNN development is a…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-06-18 Maria Kieferova , Ortiz Marrero Carlos , Nathan Wiebe

Vanishing gradients can pose substantial obstacles for high-dimensional optimization problems. Here we consider energy minimization problems for quantum many-body systems with extensive Hamiltonians and finite-range interactions, which can…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-03-26 Thomas Barthel , Qiang Miao

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

Quantum compilation provides a method to translate quantum algorithms at a high level of abstraction into their implementations as quantum circuits on real hardware. One approach to quantum compiling is to design a parameterised circuit and…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-10-18 Niall F. Robertson , Albert Akhriev , Jiri Vala , Sergiy Zhuk