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Related papers: Barren Plateaus Beyond Observable Concentration

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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 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

Barren plateaus are fundamentally a statement about quantum loss landscapes on average but there can, and generally will, exist patches of barren plateau landscapes with substantial gradients. Previous work has studied certain classes of…

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) 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…

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

The parameters of the quantum circuit in a variational quantum algorithm induce a landscape that contains the relevant information regarding its optimization hardness. In this work we investigate such landscapes through the lens of…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-03-05 Adrián Pérez-Salinas , Hao Wang , Xavier Bonet-Monroig

We argue that an excess in entanglement between the visible and hidden units in a Quantum Neural Network can hinder learning. In particular, we show that quantum neural networks that satisfy a volume-law in the entanglement entropy will…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-03-11 Carlos Ortiz Marrero , Mária Kieferová , Nathan Wiebe

Ground state preparation is classically intractable for general Hamiltonians. On quantum devices, shallow parameterized circuits can be effectively trained to obtain short-range entangled states under the paradigm of variational quantum…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-04-11 Hao-Kai Zhang , Shuo Liu , Shi-Xin Zhang

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

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

Out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) have been proposed as a tool to witness quantum information scrambling in many-body system dynamics. These correlators can be understood as averages over nonclassical multi-time quasi-probability…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2020-01-29 Razieh Mohseninia , José Raúl González Alonso , Justin Dressel

Motivated by realistic hardware considerations of the pre-fault-tolerant era, we comprehensively study the impact of uncorrected noise on quantum circuits. We first show that any noise `truncates' most quantum circuits to effectively…

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

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

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

In this paper, we propose a general scheme to analyze the gradient vanishing phenomenon, also known as the barren plateau phenomenon, in training quantum neural networks with the ZX-calculus. More precisely, we extend the barren plateaus…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-06-09 Chen Zhao , Xiao-Shan Gao

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

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

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