# Investigating the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis for Variational Quantum Circuits

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11190 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11190/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Variational Quantum Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09265/) (2020)
- [Barren plateaus in quantum neural network training landscapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11173/) (2018)
- [What is the State of Neural Network Pruning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03033/) (2020)
- [The State of Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09574/) (2019)
- [What's Hidden in a Randomly Weighted Neural Network?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.13299/) (2019)
- [Proving the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Pruning is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00585/) (2020)
- [Quantum circuit architecture search for variational quantum algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10217/) (2020)
- [Gradient Flow in Sparse Neural Networks and How Lottery Tickets Win](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03533/) (2020)
- [Unmasking the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: What's Encoded in a Winning Ticket's Mask?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03044/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Lottery Ticket Hypothesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04861/) (2024)
- [A General Framework For Proving The Equivariant Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04270/) (2022)
- [Investigating and Mitigating Barren Plateaus in Variational Quantum Circuits: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17706/) (2024)
- [QAdaPrune: Adaptive Parameter Pruning For Training Variational Quantum Circuits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13352/) (2024)
- [Finding Strong Lottery Ticket Networks with Genetic Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04658/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Quantum computing is an emerging field in computer science that has seen considerable progress in recent years, especially in machine learning. By harnessing the principles of quantum physics, it can surpass the limitations of classical algorithms. However, variational quantum circuits (VQCs), which rely on adjustable parameters, often face the barren plateau phenomenon, hindering optimization. The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) is a recent concept in classical machine learning that has led to notable improvements in parameter efficiency for neural networks. It states that within a large network, a smaller, more efficient subnetwork, or ''winning ticket,'' can achieve comparable performance, potentially circumventing plateau challenges. In this work, we investigate whether this idea can apply to VQCs. We show that the weak LTH holds for VQCs, revealing winning tickets that retain just 26.0% of the original parameters. For the strong LTH, where a pruning mask is learned without any training, we discovered a winning ticket in a binary VQC, achieving 100% accuracy with only 45% of the weights. These findings indicate that LTH may mitigate barren plateaus by reducing parameter counts while preserving performance, thus enhancing the efficiency of VQCs in quantum machine learning tasks.