Episode description

During this time of lockdown, the centre for quantum software and information (QSI) at the University of Technology Sydney has launched an online seminar series.  With talks once or twice a week from leading researchers in the field, meQuanics is supporting this series by mirroring the audio from each talk.  I would encourage if you listen to this episode, to visit and subscribe to the UTS:QSI YouTube page to see each of these talks with the associated slides to help it make more sense.  

Building better deep learning representations for quantum mixed states by adding quantum layers to classical probabilistic models.  

TITLE: Quantum-probabilistic Generative Models and Variational Quantum Thermalization 

SPEAKER: Guillaume Verdon 

AFFILIATION: X (formerly Google X), California, USA 

HOSTED BY: A/Prof. Chris Ferrie, Centre for Quantum Software and Information  

ABSTRACT:  We introduce a new class of generative quantum-neural-network-based models called Quantum Hamiltonian-Based Models (QHBMs). In doing so, we establish a paradigmatic approach for quantum-probabilistic hybrid variational learning of quantum mixed states, where we efficiently decompose the tasks of learning classical and quantum correlations in a way which maximizes the utility of both classical and quantum processors. In addition, we introduce the Variational Quantum Thermalizer (VQT) algorithm for generating the thermal state of a given Hamiltonian and target temperature, a task for which QHBMs are naturally well-suited. The VQT can be seen as a generalization of the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) to thermal states: we show that the VQT converges to the VQE in the zero temperature limit. We provide numerical results demonstrating the efficacy of these techniques in several illustrative examples. In addition to the introduction to the theory and applications behind these models, we will briefly walk through their numerical implementation in TensorFlow Quantum.  

RELATED ARTICLES: Quantum Hamiltonian-Based Models and the Variational Quantum Thermalizer Algorithm: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.02071

TensorFlow Quantum: A Software Framework for Quantum Machine Learning: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.02989 

OTHER LINKS: X: https://x.company/