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Training quantum neural networks (QNNs) using gradient-based or gradient-free classical optimisation approaches is severely impacted by the presence of barren plateaus in the cost landscapes. In this paper, we devise a framework for…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-06-04 Yidong Liao , Min-Hsiu Hsieh , Chris Ferrie

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

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

In variational quantum algorithms the parameters of a parameterized quantum circuit are optimized in order to minimize a cost function that encodes the solution of the problem. The barren plateau phenomenon manifests as an exponentially…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-11-14 Marco Schumann , Frank K. Wilhelm , Alessandro Ciani

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

In quantum chemistry, the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is a promising algorithm for molecular simulations on near-term quantum computers. However, VQEs using hardware-efficient circuits face scaling challenges due to the barren…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-09-27 Rui Mao , Guojing Tian , Xiaoming Sun

Parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) have emerged as a foundational element in the development and applications of quantum algorithms. However, when initialized with random parameter values, PQCs often exhibit barren plateaus (BP). These…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-07-02 Muhammad Kashif , Muhammad Rashid , Saif Al-Kuwari , Muhammad Shafique

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

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…

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

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

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

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

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

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs), which classically optimize a parametrized quantum circuit to solve a computational task, promise to advance our understanding of quantum many-body systems and improve machine learning algorithms using…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-06-09 Roeland Wiersema , Cunlu Zhou , Juan Felipe Carrasquilla , Yong Baek Kim

We introduce statistical models for each of the three main sources of barren plateaus: non-locality of the observable, entanglement of the initial state, and circuit expressivity. For instance, non-local observables are modeled by random…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-05-14 Nikita Nemkov

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

Quantum reservoir computing (QRC) is an emerging framework for near-term quantum machine learning that offers in-memory processing, platform versatility across analogue and digital systems, and avoids typical trainability challenges such as…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-05-21 Antonio Sannia , Gian Luca Giorgi , Roberta Zambrini

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

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…