Building scalable variational circuit training for

machine learning tasks

Kathleen E. Hamilton Emily Lynn
Tyler Kharazi Titus Morris
Ryan S. Bennink and Raphael C. Pooser
2021 58th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC) | 978-1-6654-3274-0/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/DAC18074.2021.9586171

Index Terms—quantum computing, NISQ computing, error
mitigation, noise characterization
Parameterized quantum circuits (PQC) have emerged as a
quantum analogue of deep neural networks and can be trained
for discriminative or generative tasks and can be trained with
gradient-based optimization on near-term quantum devices [1],
[2], [3]. In the current era of quantum computing, known as
the noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) era [4], these
devices contain a moderate number of qubits (< 100), and
algorithmic performance is strongly impacted by hardware
noise. Additionally, the training of PQCs are hybrid algorithms,
in which the computational workflow is split between quantum
and classical computing platforms.
Understanding the resource requirements and computational
overhead needed to train PQCs efficiently will aid in the
development of scalable training methods. In this talk I will
highlight several recent results which we have developed in
pursuit of scalable methods for gradient-based training and
error mitigation [5], [6].
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank Vicente Leyton-Ortega for
insightful discussions about noise characterization and error
mitigation.
Acknowledgements: This research used quantum computing
resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility,
which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported
under Contract DE-AC05-00OR22725. Work by DOE Office
of Science User Facilities Division. This work was supported
as part of the ASCR Testbed Pathfinder Program at Oak
Ridge National Laboratory under FWP ERKJ332. This work
was supported as part of the ASCR Accelerated Research
in Quantum Computing Program at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory under FWP ERKJ 354.
C ONFLICT OF INTEREST
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
R EFERENCES
[1] Marcello Benedetti, Delfina Garcia-Pintos, Oscar Perdomo, Vicente Leyton-
Ortega, Yunseong Nam, and Alejandro Perdomo-Ortiz. A generative
modeling approach for benchmarking and training shallow quantum
circuits. npj Quantum Information, 5(1):45, 2019.
[2] Kathleen E Hamilton, Eugene F Dumitrescu, and Raphael C Pooser.
Generative model benchmarks for superconducting qubits. Physical
Review A, 99(6):062323, 2019.
[3] Vicente Leyton-Ortega, Alejandro Perdomo-Ortiz, and Oscar Perdomo.
Robust implementation of generative modeling with parametrized quantum
circuits. arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.08047, 2019.
[4] John Preskill. Quantum computing in the NISQ era and beyond. Quantum,
2:79, 2018.
[5] Kathleen E Hamilton and Raphael C Pooser. Error-mitigated data-
driven circuit learning on noisy quantum hardware. arXiv preprint
arXiv:1911.13289, 2019.
[6] Kathleen E Hamilton, Tyler Kharazi, Titus Morris, Alexander J McCaskey,
Ryan S Bennink, and Raphael C Pooser. Scalable quantum processor noise
characterization. In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Quantum
Computing and Engineering (QCE), pages 430–440. IEEE, 2020.

This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under Contract No.
DE-AC0500OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States
Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication,
acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-
up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form
of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for the United States Government
purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results
of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access
Plan.
K. Hamilton, T. Kharazi, R. Bennink, and R. Pooser are with the Computer
Science and Engineering Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge,
Tennessee .
E-mail: hamiltonke@ornl.gov
T. Morris is with the Physical Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National
Laboratory Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
E. Lynn is with the Physics and Astronomy Department, Taylor University,
Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Manuscript received XXXX; revised YYYY.

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