The power of quantum neural networks

It is unknown whether near-term quantum computers are advantageous for machine learning tasks. In this work we address this question by trying to understand how powerful and trainable quantum machine learning models are in relation to popular classical neural networks. We propose the effective dimension—a measure that captures these qualities—and prove that it can be used to assess any statistical model’s ability to generalize on new data. Crucially, the effective dimension is a data-dependent measure that depends on the Fisher information, which allows us to gauge the ability of a model to train. We demonstrate numerically that a class of quantum neural networks is able to achieve a considerably better effective dimension than comparable feedforward networks and train faster, suggesting an advantage for quantum machine learning, which we verify on real quantum hardware. A class of quantum neural networks is presented that outperforms comparable classical feedforward networks. They achieve a higher capacity in terms of effective dimension and at the same time train faster, suggesting a quantum advantage.