Scalable Quantum Reservoir Computing over Distributed Quantum Architectures

Reservoir computing provides an alternative to recurrent neural networks by overcoming the common problems of backpropagation through time and by training only a simple readout layer. The emerging field of quantum computing offers a new computing paradigm that promises to enhance learning through richer feature representations. In this work, we investigate quantum reservoir computing for time-series forecasting. We explore and benchmark four different architectures that combine single or multiple (distributed) reservoirs with single or multiple (distributed) ridge-regression readout layers. We evaluate these architectures using ideal and hardware-informed noisy simulations, and include both hybrid and fully quantum variants, with classical reservoir counterparts serving as a baseline. The results indicate that quantum-enhanced configurations consistently improve forecasting accuracy by reducing the mean absolute error (MAE) and the root mean squared error (RMSE) up to 78.8% and 72.3%, respectively, while distributed architectures effectively enable scaling by utilizing multiple quantum resources in a hardware-agnostic manner. These findings support distributed quantum reservoir computing as a promising, modular approach for forecasting on the quantum platforms of the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era.