A Hybrid Quantum-Classical Generative Adversarial Network for Near-Term Quantum Processors

In this article, we present a hybrid quantum-classical generative adversarial network (GAN) for near-term quantum processors. The hybrid GAN comprises a variational generator and a discriminator quantum neural network, which are trained using a classic computer. The generator network is realized using angle-encoding and variational quantum circuits. The discriminator network is realized using multi-stage trainable encoding quantum circuits. A modular design approach is proposed for quantum neural networks which allows control on their depth to compromise accuracy and circuit complexity. Moreover, this modular approach makes the quantum neural networks amenable to scaling up the dimension of dataset and the number of qubits. Gradients of the loss functions are derived using the same quantum circuits used for the implementation of quantum neural networks to prevent the need for extra quantum circuits or auxiliary qubits. The quantum simulations are performed using the IBM Qiskit open-source software development kit (SDK), while the training of the hybrid quantum-classical GAN is conducted using the mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization on a classic computer. The hybrid quantum-classical GAN is realized using a two-qubit system with different discriminator network structures. The best performance is achieved using a five-stage discriminator network comprising 63 quantum gates and 31 trainable parameters, with the Kullback-Leibler (KL) and Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence scores of 0.39 and 0.52, respectively, for the similarity between the real and generated data distributions.