A Hybrid Quantum enabled RBM Advantage: Convolutional Autoencoders For Quantum Image Compression and Generative Learning

Understanding how the D-Wave quantum computer could be used for machine learning problems is of growing interest. Our work evaluates the feasibility of using the D-Wave as a sampler for machine learning. We describe a hybrid system that combines a classical deep neural network autoencoder with a quantum annealing Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) using the D-Wave. We evaluate our hybrid autoencoder algorithm using two datasets, the MNIST dataset and MNIST Fashion dataset. We evaluate the quality of this method by using a downstream classification method where the training is based on quantum RBM-generated samples. Our method overcomes two key limitations in the current 2000-qubit D-Wave processor, namely the limited number of qubits available to accommodate typical problem sizes for fully connected quantum objective functions and samples that are binary pixel representations. As a consequence of these limitations we are able to show how we achieved nearly a 22-fold compression factor of grayscale 28 x 28 sized images to binary 6 x 6 sized images with a lossy recovery of the original 28 x 28 grayscale images. We further show how generating samples from the D-Wave after training the RBM, resulted in 28 x 28 images that were variations of the original input data distribution, as opposed to recreating the training samples. We formulated an MNIST classification problem using a deep convolutional neural network that used samples from a quantum RBM to train the MNIST classifier and compared the results with an MNIST classifier trained with the original MNIST training data set, as well as an MNIST classifier trained using classical RBM samples. Our hybrid autoencoder approach indicates advantage for RBM results relative to the use of a current RBM classical computer implementation for image-based machine learning and even more promising results for the next generation D-Wave quantum system.