Subspace Controllability in Variational Quantum Circuits: Maximising Expressivity and Increasing Search Efficiency with Dynamical Lie Algebras

Abstract

Variational hybrid quantum models are a common paradigm for realising machine learning on quantum hardware. Nonetheless, they are challenging to train due to several problems intrinsic to the loss landscapes formed by variational quantum circuits. To mitigate these issues, researchers have extended the idea of subspace controllability leading to an increase in the success rate of variational models in finding the global minimum for quantum-based tasks. However, it remains unknown whether these results extend to classical-based tasks, and if any advantages are realised over a hyperparameter search. We begin to address this question by employing controllable circuits in a multi- classification task using MNIST-1D. Our results show that over a hyperparameter search, the majority of quantum models that achieve the lowest training and validation losses are subspace controllable. These results indicate that the hyperparameter search can be restricted to such models, in turn reducing computational cost and time.