Temporal information processing on a 4,500-qubit quantum annealer

Abstract

Quantum machine learning could uncover statistical structure beyond the reach of classical models, but this requires quantum models large and expressive enough to be useful and cheap enough to read out. Most approaches optimize many quantum parameters and are thus limited by expensive training loops. Here we report a quantum machine-learning model implemented on a programmable superconducting quantum annealer that processes temporal data at large scale using up to 4,500 qubits-the largest quantum machine-learning experiment performed to date. Following the quantum reservoir computing paradigm, the untrained native many-body dynamics generated by reverse annealing is directly used to process temporal data. We prove that the interactions produced during annealing are indispensable-a non-interacting reservoir retains no memory of its input. We evaluate our model experimentally on standard memory benchmarks and demonstrate that it can successfully forecast chaotic time series. These results establish quantum annealers as a scalable platform for large-scale quantum machine learning.