# Winning Lottery Tickets in Neural Networks via a Quantum-Inspired Classical Algorithm

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13979 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13979/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [SNIP: Single-shot Network Pruning based on Connection Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02340/) (2018)
- [Rigging the Lottery: Making All Tickets Winners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11134/) (2019)
- [Pruning neural networks without any data by iteratively conserving synaptic flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05467/) (2020)
- [On the Equivalence between Kernel Quadrature Rules and Random Feature Expansions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.06800/) (2015)
- [Quantum Recommendation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08675/) (2016)
- [A quantum-inspired classical algorithm for recommendation systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04271/) (2018)
- [Neural Network with Unbounded Activation Functions is Universal Approximator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.03654/) (2015)
- [Sampling-based sublinear low-rank matrix arithmetic framework for dequantizing quantum machine learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06151/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Lottery Ticket Hypothesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04861/) (2024)
- [Quantum Ridgelet Transform: Winning Lottery Ticket of Neural Networks with Quantum Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11936/) (2023)
- [Robust Dequantization of the Quantum Singular value Transformation and Quantum Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04932/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Quantum machine learning (QML) aims to accelerate machine learning tasks by exploiting quantum computation. Previous work studied a QML algorithm for selecting sparse subnetworks from large shallow neural networks. Instead of directly solving an optimization problem over a large-scale network, this algorithm constructs a sparse subnetwork by sampling hidden nodes from an optimized probability distribution defined using the ridgelet transform. The quantum algorithm performs this sampling in time O(D) in the data dimension D, whereas a naive classical implementation relies on handling exponentially many candidate nodes and hence takes exp[O(D)] time. In this work, we construct and analyze a quantum-inspired fully classical algorithm for the same sampling task. We show that our algorithm runs in time O(operatornamepoly(D)), thereby removing the exponential dependence on D from the previous classical approach. Numerical simulations show that the proposed sampler achieves empirical risk comparable to exact sampling from the optimized distribution and substantially lower than sampling from the non-optimized uniform distribution, while also exhibiting exponentially improved runtime scaling compared with the conventional classical implementation. These successful dequantization results show that sparse subnetwork selection via optimized sampling can be achieved classically with polynomial data-dimension scaling on conventional computers without quantum hardware, providing an alternative to the existing quantum algorithm.