High-expressibility Quantum Neural Networks using only classical resources

Abstract: Quantum neural networks (QNNs), as currently formulated, are near-term quantum machine learning architectures that leverage parameterized quantum circuits with the aim of improving upon the performance of their classical counterparts. In this work, we show that some desired properties attributed to these models can be efficiently reproduced without necessarily resorting to quantum hardware. We indeed study the expressibility of parametrized quantum circuit commonly used in QNN applications and contrast it to those of two classes of states that can be efficiently simulated classically: matrix-product states (MPS), and Clifford-enhanced MPS (CMPS), obtained by applying a set of Clifford gates to MPS. In addition to expressibility, we assess the level of primary quantum resources, entanglement and non-stabilizerness (a.k.a. "magic"), in random ensembles of such quantum states, tracking their convergence to the Haar distribution. While MPS require a large number of parameters to reproduce an arbitrary quantum state, we find that CMPS approach the Haar distribution more rapidly, in terms of both entanglement and magic. Our results indicate that high expressibility in QNNs is attainable with purely classical resources.