First Workshop on Quantum Tensor Networks in Machine Learning 2020

Quantum tensor networks in machine learning (QTNML) are envisioned to have great potential to advance AI technologies. Quantum machine learning promises quantum advantages (potentially exponential speedups in training, quadratic speedup in convergence, etc.) over classical machine learning, while tensor networks provide powerful simulations of quantum machine learning algorithms on classical computers. As a rapidly growing interdisciplinary area, QTNML may serve as an amplifier for computational intelligence, a transformer for machine learning innovations, and a propeller for AI industrialization.

Tensor networks, a contracted network of factor tensors, have arisen independently in several areas of science and engineering. Such networks appear in the description of physical processes and an accompanying collection of numerical techniques have elevated the use of quantum tensor networks into a variational model of machine learning. Underlying these algorithms is the compression of high-dimensional data needed to represent quantum states of matter. These compression techniques have recently proven ripe to apply to many traditional problems faced in deep learning. Quantum tensor networks have shown significant power in compactly representing deep neural networks, and efficient training and theoretical understanding of deep neural networks. More potential QTNML technologies are rapidly emerging, such as approximating probability functions, and probabilistic graphical models. However, the topic of QTNML is relatively young and many open problems are still to be explored.

Quantum algorithms are typically described by quantum circuits (quantum computational networks). These networks are indeed a class of tensor networks, creating an evident interplay between classical tensor network contraction algorithms and executing tensor contractions on quantum processors. The modern field of quantum enhanced machine learning has started to utilize several tools from tensor network theory to create new quantum models of machine learning and to better understand existing ones.

The interplay between tensor networks, machine learning and quantum algorithms is rich. Indeed, this interplay is based not just on numerical methods but on the equivalence of tensor networks to various quantum circuits, rapidly developing algorithms from the mathematics and physics communities for optimizing and transforming tensor networks, and connections to low-rank methods for learning. A merger of tensor network algorithms with state-of-the-art approaches in deep learning is now taking place. A new community is forming, which this workshop aims to foster.