Machine learning aided dimensionality reduction toward a resource efficient projective quantum eigensolver: Formal development and pilot applications

Abstract

In recent times, a variety of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms have been developed that aim to calculate the ground state energies of molecular systems on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. Albeit the utilization of shallow depth circuits in these algorithms, the optimization of ansatz parameters necessitates a substantial number of quantum measurements, leading to prolonged runtimes on the scantly available quantum hardware. Through our work, we lay the general foundation for an interdisciplinary approach that can be used to drastically reduce the dependency of these algorithms on quantum infrastructure. We showcase these pertinent concepts within the framework of the recently developed Projective Quantum Eigensolver (PQE) that involves iterative optimization of the nonlinearly coupled parameters through repeated residue measurements on quantum hardware. We demonstrate that one may perceive such a nonlinear optimization problem as a collective dynamic interplay of fast and slow relaxing modes. As such, the synergy among the parameters is exploited using an on-the-fly supervised machine learning protocol that dynamically casts the PQE optimization into a smaller subspace by reducing the effective degrees of freedom. We demonstrate analytically and numerically that our proposed methodology ensures a drastic reduction in the number of quantum measurements necessary for the parameter updates without compromising the characteristic accuracy. Furthermore, the machine learning model may be tuned to capture the noisy data of NISQ devices, and thus the predicted energy is shown to be resilient under a given noise model.