Enhancing Generative Models via Quantum Correlations
Xun Gao, Eric R. Anschuetz, Sheng-Tao Wang, J. I. Cirac, Mikhail D. Lukin · Physical Review X · 2022
Generative modeling using samples drawn from the probability distribution constitutes a powerful approach for unsupervised machine learning.Quantum mechanical systems can produce probability distributions that exhibit quantum correlations which are difficult to capture using classical models.We show theoretically that such quantum-inspired correlations provide a powerful resource for generative modeling.In particular, we provide an unconditional proof of separation in expressive power between a class of widely used generative models, known as Bayesian networks, and its minimal quantum-inspired extension.We show that this expressivity enhancement is associated with quantum nonlocality and quantum contextuality.Furthermore, we numerically test this separation on standard machine-learning data sets and show that it holds for practical problems.The possibility of quantum-inspired enhancement demonstrated in this work not only sheds light on the design of useful quantum machine-learning protocols but also provides inspiration to draw on ideas from quantum foundations to improve purely classical algorithms.