Learning quantum tomography from incomplete measurements

Abstract: We revisit quantum tomography in an informationally incomplete scenario and propose improved state reconstruction methods using deep neural networks. In the first approach, the trained network predicts an optimal linear or quadratic reconstructor with coefficients depending only on the collection of (already taken) measurement operators. This effectively refines the undercomplete tomographic reconstructor based on pseudoinverse operation. The second, based on an LSTM recurrent network performs state reconstruction sequentially, thus is scalable. It can also optimize the measurement sequence, which suggests a no-free-lunch theorem for tomography: by narrowing the state space, we gain the possibility of more efficient tomography by learning the optimal sequence of measurements. Numerical experiments for a 2-qubit system show that both methods outperform standard maximum likelihood estimation and also scale to larger 3-qubit systems. Our results demonstrate that neural networks can effectively learn the underlying geometry of multi-qubit states using this for their reconstruction.