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Approximate Quantum Random Access Memory
Architectures
Koustubh Phalak, Student Member, IEEE, Junde Li, Student Member, IEEE, Swaroop Ghosh, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—Quantum supremacy in many applications using well-known quantum algorithms rely on availability of data in quantum
format. Quantum Random Access Memory (QRAM), an equivalent of classical Random Access Memory (RAM), fulfills this
requirement. However, the existing QRAM proposals either require qutrit technology and/or incur access challenges. We propose an
approximate Parametric Quantum Circuit (PQC) based QRAM which takes address lines as input and gives out the corresponding data
in these address lines as the output. We present two applications of the proposed PQC-based QRAM namely, storage of binary data
and storage of machine learning (ML) dataset for classification. For the machine learning task, we perform binary classification using
three different setups, (a) QNN with QRAM (QRAM + QNN), (b) QNN with normal data embedding and (c) Fully Connected Neural
Network (FCNN). We show that QRAM + QNN converges (with 100% classification accuracy) faster i.e., by 6th epoch, compared to
the other two setups which converge at around 10th and 15th epochs. The loss for QRAM + QNN (0.53) is less than FCNN setup
(0.89) and comparable to QNN with normal embedding (0.48). For the storage of binary data, we evaluate Hamming Distance (HD)
and percentage correct prediction metrics to quantify the performance. We observe an increase in HD from 0 to 3.97 and decrease in
percentage of correct predictions from 100%to 0.58%as we increase the number of address and data lines from 2 to 9. We propose
agglomerative clustering of data as a pre-processing step before training the QRAM to improve the HD i.e., from 3.97 to 2.17 and
increase the percentage correct predictions to 10.1% from 0.58% till 9 address lines.
Index Terms—Quantum Random Access Memory, classification, binary data, storage.
F
1 INTRODUCTION
RECENT advances of quantum computing in various fields
such as, machine learning (ML) have shown great po-
tential. Machine learning methods augmented with quantum
computing like quantum clustering, quantum decision trees,
quantum support vector machines, and quantum neural net-
works (QNNs) [1] are able to provide quantum speedup using
quantum algorithms compared to their classical counterparts
[2]. An important aspect for such augmented quantum algo-
rithms is the conversion of classical data into quantum domain.
Encoding methods like basis embedding, amplitude embed-
ding, angle embedding [3] (Chapters 5 and 6) use various
mathematical formulae to embed classical data onto qubits.
Basis embedding encodes binary data of nbits onto nqubits.
Amplitude embedding normalizes 2ndata and embeds them
onto nqubits. Angle embedding performs rotation operation
on qubits, either using RX, RY or RZ gates and embeds n
classical datapoints onto nqubits. While these methods are
useful for small and simple datasets, they are not efficient
for more complex datasets. Quantum Random Access Memory
(QRAM) to store and load quantum data could be much more
effective for quantum machine learning problems. The user
should be able to store new classical data or update it onto
the QRAM and load the stored quantum data as needed.
In this paper, we propose a Parametric Quantum Circuit
(PQC)-based trainable approximate QRAM which takes ad-
dress as input and gives output as the data for that address.
We say that the QRAM is approximate because the predicted
output of QRAM will not be exactly same as the input. This
happens because data loading methods for NISQ era quantum
computers are not perfect and there are different errors in exe-
cution of quantum circuits. We introduce relevant background
on quantum computing and quantum machine learning and
previously published related works on QRAM in Section 2 and
the architectures for the proposed QRAM in Section 3. We then
show two applications for the proposed QRAM architecture:
one for storage of digit images for performing binary classifi-
cation and other for storage of binary data, in Sections 4 and 5
respectively. We give concluding remarks in Section 6. To the
best of knowledge, this is the first approximate QRAM architecture
which can be used to load arbitrary data in quantum form to any
quantum circuit.
2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORKS
2.1 Background
Qubits: Qubits are the fundamental units of a quantum com-
puter (analogous to classical bits for a classical computer).
Unlike classical bits, qubits store information in the form of
states represented using ket notation |ψi=a
bwhere a2
denotes the probability of the qubit being measured to 0 and
b2denotes the probability of the qubit being measured to 1.
Each qubit has two basis states, one with a= 1, b = 0 (defined
as |0i) and one with a= 0, b = 1 (defined as |1i). There are
different types of qubits like superconducting qubits, ion trap
qubits, photonic qubits, neutral atom qubits, etc.
Quantum Gates: A quantum gate is a unitary operation per-
formed on a qubit that changes the state of the said qubit. Every
quantum gate can be represented as a unitary matrix, and can
work on either a single qubit or more than one qubits. The
most common ones are single qubit gates like hadamard gate
(H), bit-flip gate (X), Pauli Y and Z gates, and two qubit gates
like CNOT gate, SWAP gate, and controlled Pauli gates. There
are also special gates like reset gate and measurement gate.
Quantum Circuit: A quantum circuit is a program that contains
an ordered sequence of various quantum gates that act on spec-
ified number of qubits and may contain intermediate reset and
measurement operations. A user typically builds a quantum
circuit, and obtains classical measurement output back. Based
on the gates used and their placement, various quantum circuits
can be used for targeted applications.
Parametric Quantum Circuit: A Parametric Quantum Circuit
(PQC) is a special type of quantum circuit where user can feed
arXiv:2210.14804v2 [quant-ph] 27 Oct 2022