Role of scrambling and noise in temporal information processing with quantum systems

Abstract: Scrambling quantum systems have been demonstrated as effective substrates for temporal information processing. While their role in providing rich feature maps has been widely studied, a theoretical understanding of their performance in temporal tasks is still lacking. Here we consider a general quantum reservoir processing framework that captures a broad range of physical computing models with quantum systems. We examine the scalability and memory retention of the model with scrambling reservoirs modelled by high-order unitary designs in both noiseless and noisy settings. In the former regime, we show that measurement readouts become exponentially concentrated with increasing reservoir size, yet strikingly do not worsen with the reservoir iterations. Thus, while repeatedly reusing a small scrambling reservoir with quantum data might be viable, scaling up the problem size deteriorates generalization unless one can afford an exponential shot overhead. In contrast, the memory of early inputs and initial states decays exponentially in both reservoir size and reservoir iterations. In the noisy regime, we also prove exponential memory decays with iterations for local noisy channels. Proving these results required us to introduce new proof techniques for bounding concentration in temporal quantum learning models.