Minimizing classical resources in variational measurement-based quantum computation for generative modeling

arXiv stat.ML / 4/14/2026

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Key Points

  • Measurement-based quantum computation (MBQC) can be turned into a variational framework (VMBQC) by leveraging randomness from one-qubit measurements for generative modeling.
  • A key challenge in VMBQC is that its resulting variational quantum channel family uses roughly twice the parameter count of unitary models, scaling as N×D, which can make optimization harder and training unstable.
  • The paper proposes a restricted VMBQC model that extends the unitary setting using only a single additional trainable parameter to reduce classical/optimization burden.
  • The authors show, via numerical experiments and algebraic arguments, that this minimal extension can express probability distributions that the corresponding unitary model cannot learn.
  • Overall, the work aims to make VMBQC-based generative modeling more trainable by minimizing classical-resource requirements while retaining expressivity.

Abstract

Measurement-based quantum computation (MBQC) is a framework for quantum information processing in which a computational task is carried out through one-qubit measurements on a highly entangled resource state. Due to the indeterminacy of the outcomes of a quantum measurement, the random outcomes of these operations, if not corrected, yield a variational quantum channel family. Traditionally, this randomness is corrected through classical processing in order to ensure deterministic unitary computations. Recently, variational measurement-based quantum computation (VMBQC) has been introduced to exploit this measurement-induced randomness to gain an advantage in generative modeling. A limitation of this approach is that the corresponding channel model has twice as many parameters compared to the unitary model, scaling as N \times D, where N is the number of logical qubits (width) and D is the depth of the VMBQC model. This can often make optimization more difficult and may lead to poorly trainable models. In this paper, we present a restricted VMBQC model that extends the unitary setting to a channel-based one using only a single additional trainable parameter. We show, both numerically and algebraically, that this minimal extension is sufficient to generate probability distributions that cannot be learned by the corresponding unitary model.