MNISQ: A Large-Scale Quantum Circuit Dataset for Machine Learning on/for Quantum Computers in the NISQ era

We introduce the first large-scale dataset, MNISQ, for both the Quantum and the Classical Machine Learning community during the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum era. MNISQ consists of 4,950,000 data points organized in 9 subdatasets. Building our dataset from the quantum encoding of classical information (e.g., MNIST dataset), we deliver a dataset in a dual form: in quantum form, as circuits, and in classical form, as quantum circuit descriptions (quantum programming language, QASM). In fact, also the Machine Learning research related to quantum computers undertakes a dual challenge: enhancing machine learning exploiting the power of quantum computers, while also leveraging state-of-the-art classical machine learning methodologies to help the advancement of quantum computing. Therefore, we perform circuit classification on our dataset, tackling the task with both quantum and classical models. In the quantum endeavor, we test our circuit dataset with Quantum Kernel methods, and we show excellent results up to 97% accuracy. In the classical world, the underlying quantum mechanical structures within the quantum circuit data are not trivial. Nevertheless, we test our dataset on three classical models: Structured State Space sequence model (S4), Transformer and LSTM. In particular, the S4 model applied on the tokenized QASM sequences reaches an impressive 77% accuracy. These findings illustrate that quantum circuit-related datasets are likely to be quantum advantageous, but also that state-of-the-art machine learning methodologies can competently classify and recognize quantum circuits. We finally entrust the quantum and classical machine learning community the fundamental challenge to build more quantum-classical datasets like ours and to build future benchmarks from our experiments. The dataset is accessible on GitHub and its circuits are easily run in qulacs or qiskit.