Sample complexity of learning parametric quantum circuits

Abstract

Quantum computers hold unprecedented potentials for machine learning applications. Here, we prove that physical quantum circuits are probably approximately correct learnable on a quantum computer via empirical risk minimization: to learn a parametric quantum circuit with at most n c gates and each gate acting on a constant number of qubits, the sample complexity is bounded by O∼(nc+1) . In particular, we explicitly construct a family of variational quantum circuits with O(n c+1) elementary gates arranged in a fixed pattern, which can represent all physical quantum circuits consisting of at most n c elementary gates. Our results provide a valuable guide for quantum machine learning in both theory and practice.