Universal expressiveness of variational quantum classifiers and quantum kernels for support vector machines

Machine learning is considered to be one of the most promising applications of quantum computing. Therefore, the search for quantum advantage of the quantum analogues of machine learning models is a key research goal. Here, we show that variational quantum classifiers (VQC) and support vector machines with quantum kernels (QSVM) can solve a classification problem based on the k-Forrelation problem, which is known to be PromiseBQP-complete. Because the PromiseBQP complexity class includes all Bounded-Error Quantum Polynomial-Time (BQP) decision problems, our results imply that there exists a feature map and a quantum kernel that make VQC and QSVM efficient solvers for any BQP problem. This means that the feature map of VQC or the quantum kernel of QSVM can be designed to have quantum advantage for any classification problem that cannot be classically solved in polynomial time but contrariwise by a quantum computer.

LOST: A flexible framework for semi-automatic image annotation

State-of-the-art computer vision approaches rely on huge amounts of annotated data. The collection of such data is a time consuming process since it is mainly performed by humans. The literature shows that semi-automatic annotation approaches can significantly speed up the annotation process by the automatic generation of annotation proposals to support the annotator. In this paper we present a framework that allows for a quick and flexible design of semi-automatic annotation pipelines. We show that a good design of the process will speed up the collection of annotations. Our contribution is a new approach to image annotation that allows for the combination of different annotation tools and machine learning algorithms in one process. We further present potential applications of our approach. The source code of our framework called LOST (Label Objects and Save Time) is available at: https://github.com/l3p-cv/lost.