Anatoly Yu Smirnov and Mohammad H Amin

We develop a theory to describe dynamics of a non-stationary open quantum system interacting with a hybrid environment, which includes high-frequency and low-frequency noise components. One part of the system–bath interaction is treated in a perturbative manner, whereas the other part is considered exactly. This approach allows us to derive a set of master equations where the relaxation rates are expressed as convolutions of the Bloch–Redfield and Marcus formulas. Our theory enables analysis of systems that have extremely small energy gaps in the presence of a realistic environment. As an illustration, we apply the theory to the 16 qubit quantum annealing problem with dangling qubits (Dickson et al 2013 Nat. Commun. 4 1903) and show qualitative agreement with experimental results.

(26 Oct 2018) New Journal of Physics, Volume 20, October 2018

Andrew King et. al

The work of Berezinskii, Kosterlitz and Thouless in the 1970s revealed exotic phases of matter governed by the topological properties of low-dimensional materials such as thin films of superfluids and superconductors. A hallmark of this phenomenon is the appearance and interaction of vortices and antivortices in an angular degree of freedom—typified by the classical XY model—owing to thermal fluctuations. In the two-dimensional Ising model this angular degree of freedom is absent in the classical case, but with the addition of a transverse field it can emerge from the interplay between frustration and quantum fluctuations. Consequently, a Kosterlitz–Thouless phase transition has been predicted in the quantum system—the two-dimensional transverse-field Ising model—by theory and simulation. Here we demonstrate a large- scale quantum simulation of this phenomenon in a network of 1,800 in situ programmable superconducting niobium flux qubits whose pairwise couplings are arranged in a fully frustrated square-octagonal lattice. Essential to the critical behaviour, we observe the emergence of a complex order parameter with continuous rotational symmetry, and the onset of quasi-long-range order as the system approaches a critical temperature. We describe and use a simple approach to statistical estimation with an annealing-based quantum processor that performs Monte Carlo sampling in a chain of reverse quantum annealing protocols. Observations are consistent with classical simulations across a range of Hamiltonian parameters. We anticipate that our approach of using a quantum processor as a programmable magnetic lattice will find widespread use in the simulation and development of exotic materials.

(22 Aug 2018) Nature (Vol. 560, Issue 7719, August 22, 2018)

Read the Synopsis   See arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.02047

Amir H. Khoshaman, Mohammad H. Amin

Boltzmann machines (BMs) are appealing candidates for powerful priors in variational autoencoders (VAEs), as they are capable of capturing nontrivial and multi-modal distributions over discrete variables. However, indifferentiability of the discrete units prohibits using the reparameterization trick, essential for low-noise back propagation. The Gumbel trick resolves this problem in a consistent way by relaxing the variables and distributions, but it is incompatible with BM priors. Here, we propose the GumBolt, a model that extends the Gumbel trick to BM priors in VAEs. GumBolt is significantly simpler than the recently proposed methods with BM prior and outperforms them by a considerable margin. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on permutation invariant MNIST and OMNIGLOT datasets in the scope of models with only discrete latent variables. Moreover, the performance can be further improved by allowing multi-sampled (importance-weighted) estimation of log-likelihood in training, which was not possible with previous models.

(18 May 2018) https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.07349

Anatoly Yu. Smirnov, Mohammad H. Amin

We develop a theory to describe dynamics of a nonstationary open quantum system interacting with a hybrid environment, which includes high-frequency and low-frequency noise components. One part of the system-bath interaction is treated in a perturbative manner, whereas the other part is considered exactly. This approach allows us to derive a set of master equations where the relaxation rates are expressed as convolutions of the Bloch-Redfield and Marcus formulas. Our theory enables analysis of systems that have extremely small energy gaps in the presence of a realistic environment. We apply the theory to an example of the 16-qubit quantum annealing problem with dangling qubits and show qualitative agreement with experimental results.

(21 Feb 2018) https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07715

Amir Khoshaman, Walter Vinci, Brandon Denis, Evgeny Andriyash,and Mohammad H. Amin 

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are powerful generative models with the salient ability to perform inference. Here, we introduce a quantum variational autoencoder (QVAE): a VAE whose latent generative process is implemented as a quantum Boltzmann machine (QBM). We show that our model can be trained end-to-end by maximizing a well-defined loss-function: a “quantum” lower- bound to a variational approximation of the log-likelihood. We use quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations to train and evaluate the performance of QVAEs. To achieve the best performance, we first create a VAE platform with discrete latent space generated by a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM). Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MNIST dataset when compared against similar approaches that only involve discrete variables in the generative process. We consider QVAEs with a smaller number of latent units to be able to perform QMC simulations, which are computationally expensive. We show that QVAEs can be trained effectively in regimes where quantum effects are relevant despite training via the quantum bound. Our findings open the way to the use of quantum computers to train QVAEs to achieve competitive performance for generative models. Placing a QBM in the latent space of a VAE leverages the full potential of current and next-generation quantum computers as sampling devices.

(22 Feb 2018) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.05779.pdf 

Arash Vahdat

Collecting large training datasets, annotated with high-quality labels, is costly and time-consuming. This paper proposes a novel framework for training deep convolutional neural networks from noisy labeled datasets that can be obtained cheaply. The problem is formulated using an undirected graphical model that represents the relationship between noisy and clean labels, trained in a semi- supervised setting. In our formulation, the inference over latent clean labels is tractable and is regularized during training using auxiliary sources of information. The proposed model is applied to the image labeling problem and is shown to be effective in labeling unseen images as well as reducing label noise in training on CIFAR-10 and MS COCO datasets.

(03 Nov 2017) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.00038.pdf 

Trevor Lanting, Andrew D. King, Bram Evert, Emile Hoskinson

"Perturbative anticrossings have long been identified as a potential computational bottleneck for quantum annealing. This bottleneck can appear, for example, when a uniform transverse driver Hamiltonian is applied to each qubit. Previous theoretical research sought to alleviate such anticrossings by adjusting the transverse driver Hamiltonians on individual qubits according to a perturbative approximation. Here we apply this principle to a physical implementation of quantum annealing in a D-Wave 2000Q system. We use samples from the quantum annealing hardware and per-qubit anneal offsets to produce nonuniform driver Hamiltonians. On small instances with severe perturbative anticrossings, our algorithm yields an increase in minimum eigengaps, ground state success probabilities, and escape rates from metastable valleys. We also demonstrate that the same approach can mitigate biased sampling of degenerate ground states."

(10 Aug 2017) https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.03049

“Probabilistic models with discrete latent variables naturally capture datasets composed of discrete classes. However, they are difficult to train efficiently, since back propagation through discrete variables is generally not possible. We introduce a novel class of probabilistic models, comprising an undirected discrete component and a directed hierarchical continuous component, that can be trained efficiently using the variational autoencoder framework. The discrete component captures the distribution over the disconnected smooth manifolds induced by the continuous component. As a result, this class of models efficiently learns both the class of objects in an image, and their specific realization in pixels, from unsupervised data; and outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the permutation-invariant MNIST, OMNIGLOT, and Caltech-101 Silhouettes datasets.”

(7 Sep 2016) http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.02200

Zhengbing Bian, Fabian Chudak, Robert Israel, Brad Lackey, William G. Macready, Aidan Roy

Current quantum annealing (QA) hardware suffers from practical limitations such as finite temperature, sparse connectivity, small qubit numbers, and control error. We propose new algorithms for mapping boolean constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) onto QA hardware mitigating these limitations. In particular we develop a new embedding algorithm for mapping a CSP onto a hardware Ising model with a fixed sparse set of interactions, and propose two new decomposition algorithms for solving problems too large to map directly into hardware.

(10 Mar 2016) http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03111

Tomas Boothby, Andrew D. King, Aidan Roy

(27 Oct 2015) http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11128-015-1150-6?wt_mc=internal.event.1.SEM.ArticleAuthorOnlineFirst

A.D.King, T.Lanting, and R.Harris

(3 Sep 2015) http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.02098.pdf

Mohammad H. Amin

(13 Mar 2015) http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.04216.pdf

Jun Cai, Bill Macready, Aidan Roy

(12 Jun 2014) http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.2741.pdf

N G Dickson et al. 

"Efforts to develop useful quantum computers have been blocked primarily by environmental noiseHere we examine the environment’s effect on quantum annealing using 16 qubits of a superconducting quantum processor. For a problem instance with an isolated small-gap anticrossing between the lowest two energy levels, we experimentally demonstrate that, even with annealing times eight orders of magnitude longer than the predicted single-qubit decoherence time, the probabilities of performing a successful computation are similar to those expected for a fully coherent system. Moreover, for the problem studied, we show that quantum annealing can take advantage of a thermal environment to achieve a speedup factor of up to 1,000 over a closed system."

Nature Communications, 1903 (May 21 2013) http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n5/full/ncomms2920.html

M. W. Johnson et al. 

Many interesting but practically intractable problems can be reduced to that of finding the ground state of a system of interacting spins; however, finding such a ground state remains computationally difficult..Here we use quantum annealing to find the ground state of an artificial Ising spin system comprising an array of eight superconducting flux quantum bits with programmable spin–spin couplings. We observe a clear signature of quantum annealing, distinguishable from classical thermal annealing through the temperature dependence of the time at which the system dynamics freezes.

Nature 473, 194-198 (12 May 2011) http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v473/n7346/full/nature10012.html

Z. Bian et al. 
Link to PDF

R. Harris et al.
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F. Hamze et al
International Journal of Modern Physics C, Volume 21, issue 5 (2010) arXiv:1004.2840

T. Lanting et al.
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Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 220401 (2009) arXiv:0810.4335

M. H. S. Amin et al.
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