There is increasing interest in the potential advantages of using quantum computing technologies as sampling engines to speedup machine learning and probabilistic programming tasks.However, some pressing challenges in state-of-the-art quantum annealers have to be overcome before we can assess their actual performance. Most notably, the effective temperature at which samples are generated is instance-dependent and unknown, the interaction graph is sparse, the parameters are noisy, and the dynamic range of the parameters is finite. Of all these limitations, the sparse connectivity resulting from the local interaction between quantum bits in physical hardware implementations, is considered the most severe limitation to the quality of constructing powerful machine learning models. Here we show how to surpass this „curse of limited connectivity“ bottleneck and illustrate our findings by training probabilistic generative models with arbitrary pairwise connectivity. Our model can be trained in quantum hardware without full knowledge of the effective parameters specifying the corresponding Boltzmann-like distribution. Therefore, inference of the effective temperature is avoided and the effect of noise in the parameters is mitigated. We illustrate our findings by successfully training hardware-embedded models with all-to-all connectivity on a real dataset of handwritten digits and two synthetic datasets. In each of these datasets we show the generative capabilities of the models learned with the assistance of the quantum annealer in experiments with up to 940 quantum bits. Additionally, we show a visual Turing test with handwritten digit data, where the machine generating the digits is a quantum processor. Such digits, with a remarkable similarity to those generated by humans, are extracted from the experiments with 940 quantum bits.
Calibration of quantum computing technologies is essential to the effective utilization of their quantum resources. Specifically, the performance of quantum annealers is likely to besignificantly impaired by noise in their programmable parameters, effectively misspecification of the computational problem to be solved, often resulting in spurious suboptimal solutions. We developed a strategy to determine and correct persistent, systematic biases between the actual values of the programmable parameters and their user-specified values. We applied the recalibration strategy to two D-Wave Two quantum annealers, one at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, and another at D-Wave Systems in Burnaby, Canada. We show that the recalibration procedure not only reduces the magnitudes of the biases in the programmable parameters but also enhances the performance of the device on a set of random benchmark instances.
Lattice protein folding models are a cornerstone of computational biophysics.
Although these models are a coarse grained representation, they provide useful
insight into the energylandscape of natural proteins. Finding low-energy
three-dimensional structures is an intractable problem even in the simplest
model, the Hydrophobic-Polar (HP) model. Exhaustive search of all possible
global minima is limited to sequences in the tens of amino acids. Description
of protein-like properties are more accurately described by generalized models,
such as the one proposed by Miyazawa and Jernigan (MJ), which explicitly take
into account the unique interactions among all 20 amino acids. There is
theoretical and experimental evidence of the advantage of solving classical
optimization problems using quantum annealing over its classical analogue
(simulated annealing). In this report, we present a benchmark implementation of
quantum annealing for a biophysical problem (six different experiments up to 81
superconducting quantum bits). Although the cases presented here can be solved
in a classical computer, we present the first implementation of lattice protein
folding on a quantum device under the Miyazawa-Jernigan model. This paves the
way towards studying optimization problems in biophysics and statistical
mechanics using quantum devices.