Scalable quantum simulation of continuous-time generative models via tensor networks
Nathan X. Kodama, L. Andrew Wray, Sam Cochran, Chad Rigetti, Shravan Veerapaneni, Michael J. Keiser
Abstract
Continuous-time flow and diffusion models are widely used across many application domains, from large-scale deployment in computer vision and protein folding to emerging adoption for modeling language, time series, and quantum states. After training, inferring statistical properties from continuous-time models is costly. Wavefunction flows target this cost by recasting learned transport as unitary evolution, whose final Born distribution approximates the target distribution. This prepares a coherent amplitude encoding (a qsample) that can be post-processed by quantum algorithms offering a quadratic advantage over Monte Carlo sampling. We present the first numerical study of these flows, in which we represent time-dependent potentials and states as tensor networks. At spatial dimension $d=8$, storage falls by $\sim 10^7\times$ relative to the dense grid of $N^d$ points, and evolution wall-clock time falls by $\gtrsim 10^3\times$ against a baseline extrapolated from the measured $d\le 5$ scaling. We validate our pipeline by reproducing the $O(1/\sqrt{p_{\rm rare}})$ scaling of rare-event sampling.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.