An Application of Quantum Mechanics to Attention Methods in Computer Vision

This work proposes the quantum-state-based mapping (QSM) for machine learning. QSM uses wave functions that describe microscopic particle systems as mappings. By QSM, original inputs or features extracted by neural networks are processed as quantum states to train wave function parameters. QSM has a low computational cost, almost no additional parameters, and is easy to integrate with other modules. We demonstrate the simplest form of the wave function as a mapping, that is, when a one-dimensional particle is in an infinitely deep potential well, in combination with advanced attention modules. Experiments show that QSM significantly improves the feature recalibration ability of attention module in transfer learning tasks. Then, we tried to analyze the effectiveness of QSM. This work indicates that QSM has an important application value in interdisciplinary machine learning.