Quantum Adaptive Self-Attention for Quantum Transformer Models

Abstract: Transformer models have revolutionized sequential learning across various domains, yet their self-attention mechanism incurs quadratic computational cost, posing limitations for real-time and resource-constrained tasks. To address this, we propose Quantum Adaptive Self-Attention (QASA), a novel hybrid architecture that enhances classical Transformer models with a quantum attention mechanism. QASA replaces dot-product attention with a parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) that adaptively captures inter-token relationships in the quantum Hilbert space. Additionally, a residual quantum projection module is introduced before the feedforward network to further refine temporal features. Our design retains classical efficiency in earlier layers while injecting quantum expressiveness in the final encoder block, ensuring compatibility with current NISQ hardware. Experiments on synthetic time-series tasks demonstrate that QASA achieves faster convergence and superior generalization compared to both standard Transformers and reduced classical variants. Preliminary complexity analysis suggests potential quantum advantages in gradient computation, opening new avenues for efficient quantum deep learning models.