Quantum Convolutional Neural Network Architecture for Multi-Class Classification

We propose quantum circuit architectures for convolutional neural networks based on generalized 3-qubit and 2-qubit quantum gates for the multiclass classification problem. The quantum architecture is equivalent to a classical convolutional neural network with fully connected layers and densely connected layers. The quantum circuit parameters are optimized by minimizing the cross-entropy loss function. We validate the classification performance over several model configurations on the MNIST, Fashion-MNIST and Kuzushiji-MNIST datasets. Our proposed architecture shows classification accuracies that are comparable to classical CNNs with a similar number of parameters. In addition to this, we find that circuit depth is greatly decreased by a logarithmic factor compared to classical CNNs. We study the performance and complexity tradeoffs over several model configurations within the proposed quantum CNN architecture.