Circuit Design and Efficient Simulation of Quantum Inner Product and Empirical Studies of Its Effect on Near-Term Hybrid Quantum-Classic Machine Learning

For the essential operation, namely inner product (IP) as widely adopted in classic computing e.g. matrix multiplication, its quantum counterpart: quantum inner product (QIP), has also been recently theoretically explored with a verifiable lower complexity on quantum computers. However, it remains unclear for the embodiment of the quantum circuits (QC) for QIP, let alone a (thorough) evaluation of the QIP circuits, especially in a practical context in the NISQ era by applying QIP to ML via hybrid quantum-classic pipelines. In this paper, we carefully design the QIP circuits from scratch, whose complexity is in accordance with the theoretical complexity. To make the simulation tractable on classic computers, especially when it is integrated in the gradient-based hybrid ML pipelines, we further devise a highly-efficient simulation scheme by directly simulates the output state. Experiments show that the scheme accelerates the simulation for more than 68k times compared with the previous circuit simulator. This allows our empirical evaluation on typical machine learning tasks, ranging from supervised and self-supervised learning via neural nets, to K-Means clustering. The results show that the calculation error brought by typical quantum mechanisms would incur in general little influence on the final numerical results given sufficient qubits. However, certain tasks e.g. ranking in K-Means could be more sensitive to quantum noise. * Corresponding author. † Equal contribution. We acknowledge Zhanpeng Zhou who helped the IBM Quantum access and experiments during his stay in Tokyo, Japan. This is an independent work without any funding.