Comparing Quantum Annealing and Spiking Neuromorphic Computing for Sampling Binary Sparse Coding QUBO Problems

We consider the problem of computing a sparse binary representation of an image. To be precise, given an image and an overcomplete, non-orthonormal basis, we aim to find a sparse binary vector indicating the minimal set of basis vectors that when added together best reconstruct the given input. We formulate this problem with an L2 loss on the reconstruction error, and an L0 (or, equivalently, an L1) loss on the binary vector enforcing sparsity. This yields a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problem (QUBO), whose optimal solution(s) in general is NP-hard to find. The contribution of this work is twofold. First, we solve the sparse representation QUBOs by solving them both on a D-Wave quantum annealer with Pegasus chip connectivity via minor embedding, as well as on the Intel Loihi 2 spiking neuromorphic processor using a stochastic Non-equilibrium Boltzmann Machine (NEBM). Second, we deploy Quantum Evolution Monte Carlo with Reverse Annealing and iterated warm starting on Loihi 2 to evolve the solution quality from the respective machines. The solutions are benchmarked against simulated annealing, a classical heuristic, and the optimal solutions are computed using CPLEX. Iterated reverse quantum annealing performs similarly to simulated annealing, although simulated annealing is always able to sample the optimal solution whereas quantum annealing was not always able to. The Loihi 2 solutions that are sampled are on average more sparse than the solutions from any of the other methods. We demonstrate that both quantum annealing and neuromorphic computing are suitable for binary sparse coding QUBOs, and that Loihi 2 outperforms a D-Wave quantum annealer standard linear-schedule anneal, while iterated reverse quantum annealing performs much better than both unmodified linear-schedule quantum annealing and iterated warm starting on Loihi 2.