Investigating Quantum-Embedded Transformers on Classical Datasets for Cross-Modality Classification

We test whether a parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) improves a hybrid quantum-classical model's performance on classical datasets, using an interface-matched classical map as the control while holding all other components fixed. Our architecture, Quantum-Embedded Attention (QEA), uses a learnable projector to compress backbone features into an $n_q$-dimensional angle vector, a shallow PQC to map those angles to one- and two-qubit Pauli expectations, and a classical attention decoder to produce class logits. We hypothesized the PQC would improve accuracy or seed-to-seed stability over a classical map with matched input/output dimensions. We test this with an interface-matched $2\times2$ factorial on Breast Cancer Wisconsin at $n_q\in\{4,8\}$, independently swapping the PQC for a classical map and the attention decoder for a linear head, across five paired seeds per cell. Three of four paired quantum-minus-classical $95\%$ confidence intervals include zero; the fourth, a $+1.63$ percentage-point contrast for the attention decoder at $n_q=4$, reverses sign at $n_q=8$ and does not survive correction across the four contrasts. The experiment thus shows no consistent PQC contribution and cannot establish equivalence. A five-dataset cross-modality grid shows comparable accuracy on AG~News, Breast Cancer Wisconsin, and BirdCLEF but a large deficit on CIFAR-10; these cells are not interface-matched and are interpreted descriptively. We report all planned canonical runs, distinguish current Pauli-readout results from legacy probability-readout experiments, and analyze bottleneck, simulation, finite-shot, and noise limitations. The results do not establish a quantum advantage; they demonstrate why controlled component attribution is necessary before crediting a hybrid model's performance to its quantum layer.

Canonical quantization of neurons

Canonical quantization provides a systematic procedure for constructing quantum models from classical Hamiltonians. Here, we apply this principle to a fundamental computational primitive of machine learning: the neuron. Specifically, by viewing a neuron as a composition of an energy function and an activation function, we quantize this model by replacing the energy function with a quantum Hamiltonian and applying the activation function to it through matrix functional calculus. This results in an activation observable that can be measured on an input quantum state. We investigate the use of these quantized neurons for function approximation, where the objective is to learn an unknown observable from labeled quantum data. For this purpose, we develop hybrid quantum-classical algorithms for training and evaluation, including procedures for measuring the activation observable and estimating gradients of the squared loss error. Our algorithms for gradient estimation rely on basic primitives like classical random sampling, the Hadamard test, and Hamiltonian simulation, and those for measuring an activation observable rely on quantum algorithms known as the power of one qumode and Schroedingerization. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our quantized neurons exhibit enhanced expressive capabilities relative to corresponding classical neurons on representative learning tasks. Our work establishes canonical quantization as a principled framework for constructing quantum machine learning primitives and provides a foundation for developing neural architectures tailored to quantum data.