Iterative Quantum Feature Maps

Abstract: Quantum machine learning models that leverage quantum circuits as quantum feature maps (QFMs) are recognized for their enhanced expressive power in learning tasks. Such models have demonstrated rigorous end-to-end quantum speedups for specific families of classification problems. However, deploying deep QFMs on real quantum hardware remains challenging due to circuit noise and hardware constraints. Additionally, variational quantum algorithms often suffer from computational bottlenecks, particularly in accurate gradient estimation, which significantly increases quantum resource demands during training. We propose Iterative Quantum Feature Maps (IQFMs), a hybrid quantum-classical framework that constructs a deep architecture by iteratively connecting shallow QFMs with classically computed augmentation weights. By incorporating contrastive learning and a layer-wise training mechanism, IQFMs effectively reduces quantum runtime and mitigates noise-induced degradation. In tasks involving noisy quantum data, numerical experiments show that IQFMs outperforms quantum convolutional neural networks, without requiring the optimization of variational quantum parameters. Even for a typical classical image classification benchmark, a carefully designed IQFMs achieves performance comparable to that of classical neural networks. This framework presents a promising path to address current limitations and harness the full potential of quantum-enhanced machine learning.