Noise-Assisted Quantum Autoencoder

Abstract

Quantum autoencoder is an efficient variational quantum algorithm for quantum data compression. However, previous quantum autoencoders fail to compress and recover high-rank mixed states. In this work, we discuss the fundamental properties and limitations of the standard quantum autoencoder model in more depth, and provide an information-theoretic solution to its recovering fidelity. Based on this understanding, we present a noise-assisted quantum autoencoder algorithm to go beyond the limitations, our model can achieve high recovering fidelity for general input states. Appropriate noise channels are used to make the input mixedness and output mixedness consistent, the noise setup is determined by measurement results of the trash system. Compared with the original quantum autoencoder model, the measurement information is fully used in our algorithm. In addition to the circuit model, we design a (noise-assisted) adiabatic model of quantum autoencoder that can be implemented on quantum annealers. We verified the validity of our methods through compressing the thermal states of transverse field Ising model. For pure state ensemble compression, we also introduce a projected quantum autoencoder algorithm. Our models have wide applications for quantum data compression on near-term quantum devices.