0
$\begingroup$

I am studying how to apply neural networks to the problem of Quantum State Tomography (QST) and I got confused when it comes to decide if this is a supervised or unsupervised learning problem.

At first, I came across the usage of Restricted Boltzmann Machines in the domain of generative models, which are used for unsupervised learning, which seems right since the state tomography is a problem where I do not have access to the state in question and the only information available are measurement outcomes: thus, I am feeding my learning algorithm with unlabeled data, that is, in an unsupervised fashion.

But then I found a paper describing QST in the PAC-learning framework, which as far as I know is a framework applied to supervised problems only, but the paper seems ok since they were dealing with a training set of $(E, Tr(E\rho))$ where $E$ are measurement operators and $Tr(E\rho)$ are the trace of the measurement operator times the density matrix. The elements of the training set were drawn i.i.d from a probability distribution.

My problem here is: in QST the probability distribution and the density matrix are unknown. So how can I formulate QST as pac-learning and how can it be suited into the framework of a supervised learning algorithm? Or it depends on what kind of algorithm I am using?

RBMs are not the only approach. Nowadays, researchers are using deep neural networks and a lot of generative modeling, the most promissing being the usage of Conditional GANs.

What am I missing?

$\endgroup$
2
  • $\begingroup$ I'm sorry but I see absolutely no use for neural networks in the context of quantum state tomography --- an experimental technique. NNs are for guessing, which is contrary to the point of tomography which is to know for certain. Could you comment on this? $\endgroup$ Commented Mar 29 at 3:47
  • $\begingroup$ @justaphase but you cannot know for sure most of the time: sometimes, the quantum source producing quantum states is not known and you have limited number of measurements to characterize that source, so NN comes in handy for reconstructing quantum states from finite limited measurements. They are been widely used nowadays for this matter. I can send you some interesting papers if you are interested. $\endgroup$
    – Dimitri
    Commented Mar 30 at 12:09

0