A universal duplication-free quantum neural network

Abstract: Universality of neural networks describes the ability to approximate arbitrary function, and is a key ingredient to keep the method effective. The established models for universal quantum neural networks(QNN), however, require the preparation of multiple copies of the same quantum state to generate the nonlinearity, with the copy number increasing significantly for highly oscillating functions, resulting in a huge demand for a large-scale quantum processor. To address this problem, we propose a new QNN model that harbors universality without the need of multiple state-duplications, and is more likely to get implemented on near-term devices. To demonstrate the effectiveness, we compare our proposal with two popular QNN models in solving typical supervised learning problems. We find that our model requires significantly fewer qubits and it outperforms the other two in terms of accuracy and relative error.