Generation of High-Resolution Handwritten Digits with an Ion-Trap Quantum Computer

Generating high-quality data (e.g. images or video) is one of the most exciting and challenging frontiers in unsupervised machine learning. Utilizing quantum computers in such tasks to potentially enhance conventional machine learning algorithms has emerged as a promising application, but poses big challenges due to the limited number of qubits and the level of gate noise in available devices. In this work, we provide the first practical and experimental implementation of a quantum-classical generative algorithm capable of generating high-resolution images of handwritten digits with state-of-the-art gate-based quantum computers. In our quantum-assisted machine learning framework, we implement a quantum-circuit based generative model to learn and sample the prior distribution of a Generative Adversarial Network. We introduce a multi-basis technique that leverages the unique possibility of measuring quantum states in different bases, hence enhancing the expressivity of the prior distribution. We train this hybrid algorithm on an ion-trap device based on ¹⁷¹Yb⁺ ion qubits to generate high-quality images and quantitatively outperform comparable classical Generative Adversarial Networks trained on the popular MNIST data set for handwritten digits.