Winning Lottery Tickets in Neural Networks via a Quantum-Inspired Classical Algorithm

Quantum machine learning (QML) aims to accelerate machine learning tasks by exploiting quantum computation. Previous work studied a QML algorithm for selecting sparse subnetworks from large shallow neural networks. Instead of directly solving an optimization problem over a large-scale network, this algorithm constructs a sparse subnetwork by sampling hidden nodes from an optimized probability distribution defined using the ridgelet transform. The quantum algorithm performs this sampling in time $O(D)$ in the data dimension $D$, whereas a naive classical implementation relies on handling exponentially many candidate nodes and hence takes $\exp[O(D)]$ time. In this work, we construct and analyze a quantum-inspired fully classical algorithm for the same sampling task. We show that our algorithm runs in time $O(\operatorname{poly}(D))$, thereby removing the exponential dependence on $D$ from the previous classical approach. Numerical simulations show that the proposed sampler achieves empirical risk comparable to exact sampling from the optimized distribution and substantially lower than sampling from the non-optimized uniform distribution, while also exhibiting exponentially improved runtime scaling compared with the conventional classical implementation. These successful dequantization results show that sparse subnetwork selection via optimized sampling can be achieved classically with polynomial data-dimension scaling on conventional computers without quantum hardware, providing an alternative to the existing quantum algorithm.

Advantage of Quantum Machine Learning from General Computational Advantages

An overarching milestone of quantum machine learning (QML) is to demonstrate the advantage of QML over all possible classical learning methods in accelerating a common type of learning task as represented by supervised learning with classical data. However, the provable advantages of QML in supervised learning have been known so far only for the learning tasks designed for using the advantage of specific quantum algorithms, i.e., Shor's algorithms. Here we explicitly construct an unprecedentedly broader family of supervised learning tasks with classical data to offer the provable advantage of QML based on general quantum computational advantages, progressing beyond Shor's algorithms. Our learning task is feasibly achievable by executing a general class of functions that can be computed efficiently in polynomial time for a large fraction of inputs by arbitrary quantum algorithms but not by any classical algorithm. We prove the hardness of achieving this learning task for any possible polynomial-time classical learning method. We also clarify protocols for preparing the classical data to demonstrate this learning task in experiments. These results open routes to exploit a variety of quantum advantages in computing functions for the experimental demonstration of the advantage of QML.