# Quantum-assisted associative adversarial network: Applying quantum annealing in deep learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.10573 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10573/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Recent Advances for Quantum Neural Networks in Generative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03066/) (2022)
- [On the Sample Complexity of Quantum Boltzmann Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14969/) (2023)
- [Variational inference with a quantum computer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06720/) (2021)
- [Quantum Annealing Formulation for Binary Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02751/) (2021)
- [Quantum latent distributions in deep generative models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19857/) (2025)
- [QCA-MolGAN: Quantum Circuit Associative Molecular GAN with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05051/) (2025)
- [Quantum enhanced ensemble GANs for anomaly detection in continuous biomanufacturing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21438/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present an algorithm for learning a latent variable generative model via generative adversarial learning where the canonical uniform noise input is replaced by samples from a graphical model. This graphical model is learned by a Boltzmann machine which learns low-dimensional feature representation of data extracted by the discriminator. A quantum annealer, the D-Wave 2000Q, is used to sample from this model. This algorithm joins a growing family of algorithms that use a quantum annealing subroutine in deep learning, and provides a framework to test the advantages of quantum-assisted learning in GANs. Fully connected, symmetric bipartite and Chimera graph topologies are compared on a reduced stochastically binarized MNIST dataset, for both classical and quantum annealing sampling methods. The quantum-assisted associative adversarial network successfully learns a generative model of the MNIST dataset for all topologies, and is also applied to the LSUN dataset bedrooms class for the Chimera topology. Evaluated using the Fr'echet inception distance and inception score, the quantum and classical versions of the algorithm are found to have equivalent performance for learning an implicit generative model of the MNIST dataset.