# Beyond Barren Plateaus: A Scalable Quantum Convolutional Architecture for High-Fidelity Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11131 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11131/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Barren plateaus in quantum neural network training landscapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11173/) (2018)
- [Absence of Barren Plateaus in Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02966/) (2020)
- [TensorFlow Quantum: A Software Framework for Quantum Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02989/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNNs) offer a theoretical paradigm for quantum machine learning, their practical implementation is severely bottlenecked by barren plateaus -- the exponential vanishing of gradients -- and poor empirical accuracy compared to classical counterparts. In this work, we propose a novel QCNN architecture utilizing localized cost functions and a hardware-efficient tensor-network initialization strategy to provably mitigate barren plateaus. We evaluate our scalable QCNN on the MNIST dataset, demonstrating a significant performance leap. By resolving the gradient vanishing issue, our optimized QCNN achieves a classification accuracy of 98.7%, a substantial improvement over the baseline QCNN accuracy of 52.32% found in unmitigated models. Furthermore, we provide empirical evidence of a parameter-efficiency advantage, requiring O(log N) fewer trainable parameters than equivalent classical CNNs to achieve >95% convergence. This work bridges the gap between theoretical quantum utility and practical application, providing a scalable framework for quantum computer vision tasks without succumbing to loss landscape concentration.