Designing quantum multi-category classifier from the perspective of brain processing information

In the field of machine learning, the multi-category classification problem plays a crucial role. Solving the problem has a profound impact on driving the innovation and development of machine learning techniques and addressing complex problems in the real world. In recent years, researchers have begun to focus on utilizing quantum computing to solve the multi-category classification problem. Some studies have shown that the process of processing information in the brain may be related to quantum phenomena, with different brain regions having neurons with different structures. Inspired by this, we design a quantum multi-category classifier model from this perspective for the first time. The model employs a heterogeneous population of quantum neural networks (QNNs) to simulate the cooperative work of multiple different brain regions. When processing information, these heterogeneous clusters of QNNs allow for simultaneous execution on different quantum computers, thus simulating the brain’s ability to utilize multiple brain regions working in concert to maintain the robustness of the model. By setting the number of heterogeneous QNN clusters and parameterizing the number of stacks of unit layers in the quantum circuit, the model demonstrates excellent scalability in dealing with different types of data and different numbers of classes in the classification problem. Based on the attention mechanism of the brain, we integrate the processing results of heterogeneous QNN clusters to achieve high accuracy in classification. Finally, we conducted classification simulation experiments on different datasets. The results show that our method exhibits strong robustness and scalability. Among them, on different subsets of the MNIST dataset, its classification accuracy improves by up to about 5% compared to other quantum multiclassification algorithms. This result becomes the state-of-the-art simulation result for quantum classification models and exceeds the performance of classical classifiers with a considerable number of trainable parameters on some subsets of the MNIST dataset.