From Quantum Graph Computing to Quantum Graph Learning: A Survey

Quantum computing (QC) is a new computational paradigm whose foundations relate to quantum physics. Notable progress has been made, driving the birth of a series of quantum-based algorithms that take advantage of quantum computational power. In this paper, we provide a targeted survey of the development of QC for graph-related tasks. We first elaborate the correlations between quantum mechanics and graph theory to show that quantum computers are able to generate useful solutions that can not be produced by classical systems efficiently for some problems related to graphs. For its practicability and wide-applicability, we give a brief review of typical graph learning techniques designed for various tasks. Inspired by these powerful methods, we note that advanced quantum algorithms have been proposed for characterizing the graph structures. We give a snapshot of quantum graph learning where expectations serve as a catalyst for subsequent research. We further discuss the challenges of using quantum algorithms in graph learning, and future directions towards more flexible and versatile quantum graph learning solvers.