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On the Sample Complexity of Quantum Boltzmann Machine Learning

Quantum Physics 2025-02-13 v4 Machine Learning

Abstract

Quantum Boltzmann machines (QBMs) are machine-learning models for both classical and quantum data. We give an operational definition of QBM learning in terms of the difference in expectation values between the model and target, taking into account the polynomial size of the data set. By using the relative entropy as a loss function this problem can be solved without encountering barren plateaus. We prove that a solution can be obtained with stochastic gradient descent using at most a polynomial number of Gibbs states. We also prove that pre-training on a subset of the QBM parameters can only lower the sample complexity bounds. In particular, we give pre-training strategies based on mean-field, Gaussian Fermionic, and geometrically local Hamiltonians. We verify these models and our theoretical findings numerically on a quantum and a classical data set. Our results establish that QBMs are promising machine learning models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2306.14969,
  title  = {On the Sample Complexity of Quantum Boltzmann Machine Learning},
  author = {Luuk Coopmans and Marcello Benedetti},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.14969},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Main text: 11 pages, 3 figures. Supplementary information: 16 pages, 2 figures. We correct a mistake that affected both lemmas 6 and 7. We thank Dhrumil Patel and Mark M. Wilde for identifying this mistake

R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:14:58.200Z