Parameter-efficient Quantum Multi-task Learning

Multi-task learning (MTL) improves generalization and data efficiency by jointly learning related tasks through shared representations. In the widely used hard-parameter-sharing setting, a shared backbone is combined with task-specific prediction heads. However, task-specific parameters can grow rapidly with the number of tasks. Therefore, designing multi-task heads that preserve task specialization while improving parameter efficiency remains a key challenge. In Quantum Machine Learning (QML), variational quantum circuits (VQCs) provide a compact mechanism for mapping classical data to quantum states residing in high-dimensional Hilbert spaces, enabling expressive representations within constrained parameter budgets. We propose a parameter-efficient quantum multi-task learning (QMTL) framework that replaces conventional task-specific linear heads with a fully quantum prediction head in a hybrid architecture. The model consists of a VQC with a shared, task-independent quantum encoding stage, followed by lightweight task-specific ansatz blocks enabling localized task adaptation while maintaining compact parameterization. Under a controlled and capacity-matched formulation where the shared representation dimension grows with the number of tasks, our parameter-scaling analysis demonstrates that a standard classical head exhibits quadratic growth, whereas the proposed quantum head parameter cost scales linearly. We evaluate QMTL on three multi-task benchmarks spanning natural language processing, medical imaging, and multimodal sarcasm detection, where we achieve performance comparable to, and in some cases exceeding, classical hard-parameter-sharing baselines while consistently outperforming existing hybrid quantum MTL models with substantially fewer head parameters. We further demonstrate QMTL's executability on noisy simulators and real quantum hardware, illustrating its feasibility.

A Qubit-Efficient Hybrid Quantum Encoding Mechanism for Quantum Machine Learning

Efficiently embedding high-dimensional datasets onto noisy and low-qubit quantum systems is a significant barrier to practical Quantum Machine Learning (QML). Approaches such as quantum autoencoders can be constrained by current hardware capabilities and may exhibit vulnerabilities to reconstruction attacks due to their invertibility. We propose Quantum Principal Geodesic Analysis (qPGA), a novel, non-invertible method for dimensionality reduction and qubit-efficient encoding. Executed classically, qPGA leverages Riemannian geometry to project data onto the unit Hilbert sphere, generating outputs inherently suitable for quantum amplitude encoding. This technique preserves the neighborhood structure of high-dimensional datasets within a compact latent space, significantly reducing qubit requirements for amplitude encoding. We derive theoretical bounds quantifying qubit requirements for effective encoding onto noisy systems. Empirical results on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 show that qPGA preserves local structure more effectively than both quantum and hybrid autoencoders. Additionally, we demonstrate that qPGA enhances resistance to reconstruction attacks due to its non-invertible nature. In downstream QML classification tasks, qPGA can achieve over 99% accuracy and F1-score on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, outperforming quantum-dependent baselines. Initial tests on real hardware and noisy simulators confirm its potential for noise-resilient performance, offering a scalable solution for advancing QML applications.

A Hybrid Quantum Neural Network for Split Learning

Quantum Machine Learning (QML) is an emerging field of research with potential applications to distributed collaborative learning, such as Split Learning (SL). SL allows resource-constrained clients to collaboratively train ML models with a server, reduce their computational overhead, and enable data privacy by avoiding raw data sharing. Although QML with SL has been studied, the problem remains open in resource-constrained environments where clients lack quantum computing capabilities. Additionally, data privacy leakage between client and server in SL poses risks of reconstruction attacks on the server side. To address these issues, we propose Hybrid Quantum Split Learning (HQSL), an application of Hybrid QML in SL. HQSL enables classical clients to train models with a hybrid quantum server and curtails reconstruction attacks. In addition, we introduce a novel qubit-efficient data-loading technique for designing a quantum layer in HQSL, minimizing both the number of qubits and circuit depth. Experiments on five datasets demonstrate HQSL's feasibility and ability to enhance classification performance compared to its classical models. Notably, HQSL achieves mean improvements of over 3% in both accuracy and F1-score for the Fashion-MNIST dataset, and over 1.5% in both metrics for the Speech Commands dataset. We expand these studies to include up to 100 clients, confirming HQSL's scalability. Moreover, we introduce a noise-based defense mechanism to tackle reconstruction attacks on the server side. Overall, HQSL enables classical clients to collaboratively train their models with a hybrid quantum server, leveraging quantum advantages while improving model performance and security against data privacy leakage-related reconstruction attacks.