6–11 Dec 2026
Stellenbosch University
Africa/Johannesburg timezone

Spectral Born machines: Classically trainable quantum generative models for discrete data

10 Dec 2026, 16:20
20m
Jan Mouton Learning Centre (Stellenbosch University)

Jan Mouton Learning Centre

Stellenbosch University

Speaker

Joseph Bowles (Xanadu)

Description

We present \emph{spectral Born machines}, a class of quantum generative models that results from viewing and generalizing the class of IQP Born machines through the lens of group Fourier analysis. These quantum models exploit the quantum Fourier transform in order to induce smoothness priors that make them naturally suited to learning integer-structured data, while remaining classically hard to sample from in general. Similar to IQP Born machines, spectral Born machines can be trained efficiently at scale on classical hardware via a maximum mean discrepancy loss based on graph spectral analysis, which we make available in a new \emph{tcdq} module of the PennyLane software platform. In numerical experiments, we show how the spectral bias of the model leads to significantly reduced parameter counts compared to unstructured approaches, and demonstrate the scalability of the software by training a 190-qubit model with over 1 million parameters to successfully learn a distribution of 93 nucleotide-long ribosomal RNA. Our results suggest that highly over-parameterized spectral Born machines may be immune to overfitting, even in strongly data-scarce regimes.

Topic Quantum variational circuits and their applications
Additional Topic Hybrid quantum-classical approaches for learning and optimization

Authors

Dr Austin Huang (Xanadu) Dr Evan Peters (Xanadu) Dr Jason Pye (Xanadu) Joseph Bowles (Xanadu) Dr Soran Jahangiri (Xanadu) Dr Vasilis Belis (Xanadu) Dr William Maxwell (Xanadu)

Presentation materials