[ENTRY][Floq] Trainable Quantum Embedding Kernels with PennyLane

[emgilfuster]

Team Name:

Notorious FUB

Project Description:

A central bottleneck of kernel-based machine learning is the choice of the kernel itself. This problem, called model selection, saw some novel approaches in the 2000s, where a couple quantities were proposed as kernel quality estimators. It was proved that a kernel with a high polarization or alignment would have good classification and generalisation behavior. One would use this instead of an exhaustive parameter search e.g. when choosing the value of the variance for the everpresent gaussian kernels.

Recent research efforts have been made in studying the use and performance of quantum kernels in learning models. We propose to leverage the theoretical results from those early papers into studying the viability of trainable quantum kernels. We attempt this under the lens of the full-stack, providing a general purpose new module to Pennylane for further implementation of kernel methods. This includes methods e.g. for dealing with noise in the kernel matrix estimation, and for maximizing the kernel alignment, out of the shelf. In add, we provide demos and analysis on real quantum hardware as well as high-performing classical simulators.

Presentation:

https://github.com/thubregtsen/qhack/blob/master/submission/blogpost.md
https://github.com/thubregtsen/qhack/blob/master/submission/kernel_demonstration.ipynb
https://github.com/thubregtsen/qhack/blob/master/submission/floq_MNIST_demonstration.ipynb

Source code:

PennyLaneAI/pennylane#1102
https://github.com/thubregtsen/qhack/tree/master/submission

[emgilfuster]

@thubregtsen
@peter-janderks
@johannesjmeyer
@dwierichs

[co9olguy]

Thanks for the submission! We hope you have enjoyed participating in QHack 😃

We will be assessing the entries and contacting the winners separately. Winners will be publicly announced sometime in the next month.

We will also be freezing the GitHub repo as we sort through the submitted projects, so you will not be able to update this submission.