A Comparison of Evolutionary Algorithms for Training Variational Quantum Classifiers

Quantum machine learning is a research area that explores the interplay of ideas from quantum computing and machine learning to speed up the time it takes to train or evaluate a machine learning model. Variational quantum classifiers are among the most widely used quantum models for supervised machine learning and base their operation on learning free parameters through conventional optimization algorithms. In spite of their potential benefits, there is a design issue making quantum variational classifiers not fully operative: the existence of exponentially vanishing gradients, known as “barren plateau landscapes”. A barren plateau is a trainability problem that occurs in optimization algorithms for quantum machine learning when the problem-solving space turns flat as the algorithm is run. In that situation, the algorithm cannot find the downward slope in what appears to be a featureless landscape and there's no clear path to the optimum of the cost function. In this challenging scenario, evolutionary optimization techniques can be a viable choice in solving the problem because of their gradient independence. This paper introduces a comparative study involving different evolutionary algorithms to assess their suitability in acting as optimizer for a specific quantum machine learning method, known as variational quantum classifier.