Complex-valued Quantum Neural Networks

Jingwei Wen

doi:10.1038/s41534-026-01369-x

Complex-valued Quantum Neural Networks

2026-09-23

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DOI：10.1038/s41534-026-01369-x

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The field of quantum neural networks, an emerging interdisciplinary frontier bridging quantum computing and machine learning, has recently garnered substantial attention in the scientific community. In this work, we propose a complex-valued quantum neural network in the quantum circuit framework through expanding the number domains of conventional quantum machine learning architecture from the real-valued domain to the complex-valued plane. Such an expansion can alleviate the unitary constraints in quantum feature maps and optimization blocks, and introduce enhanced nonlinear characteristics. It is proven theoretically that the expressivity can be significantly enhanced through the frequency-dependent adaptability and the exponential or hyperbolic functional distribution extension for the Fourier coefficients of quantum models' outputs. Moreover, analysis based on covering numbers indicates that our algorithm can achieve an adaptive balance between expressivity and generalization via the trainable scaling factor, while exhibiting superior parameter efficiency relative to unitary quantum learning models. The performance of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated through extensive numerical simulations in regression and classification tasks, including an experimental realization on the superconducting quantum processor. Our work advances the harnessing of imaginarity resources of quantum theory for learning tasks, achieving a theoretically grounded performance enhancement, and underscores the potential of improving quantum neural networks through structured design for future applications.

Complex-valued Quantum Neural Networks

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