Quantum generative models for data generation

Abstract

In recent years, many generation-based machine learning algorithms such as generative adversarial networks, Boltzmann machine, auto-encoder, etc. are widely used in data generation and probability distribution simulation. On the other hand, the combined algorithms of quantum computation and classical machine learning algorithms are proposed in various styles. Especially, there exist many relevant researches about quantum generative models, which are regarded as the branch of quantum machine learning. Quantum generative models are hybrid quantum-classical algorithms, in which parameterized quantum circuits are introduced to obtain the cost function of the task as well as its gradient, and then classical optimization algorithms are used to find the optima. Compared with its classical counterpart, quantum generative models map the data stream to high-dimensional Hilbert space with parameterized quantum circuits. In the mapping space, data features are easier to learn, which can surpass classical generative models in some tasks. Besides, quantum generative models are potential to realize the quantum advantage in noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.