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Variational Phasor Circuits for Phase-Native Brain-Computer Interface Classification

arXiv cs.LG / 3/20/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces Variational Phasor Circuit (VPC), a deterministic classical learning architecture that operates on the unit circle S^1 using trainable phase shifts, local unitary mixing, and structured interference in complex space.
  • VPC supports both binary and multi-class classification of spatially distributed signals with a phase-native design that enables compact decision boundaries.
  • A single VPC block provides phase-based decision boundaries, and stacked VPCs with inter-block pull-back normalization enable deeper circuits.
  • On synthetic brain-computer interface benchmarks, VPC achieves competitive accuracy with substantially fewer trainable parameters than standard Euclidean baselines, suggesting phase interference as a practical alternative to dense neural computation and potential as a front-end encoding layer for hybrid phasor-quantum systems.

Abstract

We present the \textbf{Variational Phasor Circuit (VPC)}, a deterministic classical learning architecture operating on the continuous S^1 unit circle manifold. Inspired by variational quantum circuits, VPC replaces dense real-valued weight matrices with trainable phase shifts, local unitary mixing, and structured interference in the ambient complex space. This phase-native design provides a unified method for both binary and multi-class classification of spatially distributed signals. A single VPC block supports compact phase-based decision boundaries, while stacked VPC compositions extend the model to deeper circuits through inter-block pull-back normalization. Using synthetic brain-computer interface benchmarks, we show that VPC can decode difficult mental-state classification tasks with competitive accuracy and substantially fewer trainable parameters than standard Euclidean baselines. These results position unit-circle phase interference as a practical and mathematically principled alternative to dense neural computation, and motivate VPC as both a standalone classifier and a front-end encoding layer for future hybrid phasor-quantum systems.