Fast and memory-efficient classical simulation of quantum machine learning via forward and backward gate fusion

While real quantum devices have been increasingly used to conduct research focused on achieving quantum advantage or quantum utility in recent years, executing deep quantum circuits or performing quantum machine learning with large-scale data on current noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices remains challenging, making classical simulation essential for quantum machine learning research. However, classical simulation often suffers from the cost of gradient calculations, requiring enormous memory or computational time. In this paper, to address these problems, we propose a method to fuse multiple consecutive gates in each of the forward and backward paths to improve throughput by minimizing global memory accesses. As a result, we achieved approximately 20 times throughput improvement for a Hardware-Efficient Ansatz with 12 or more qubits, reaching over 30 times improvement on a mid-range consumer GPU with limited memory bandwidth. By combining our proposed method with gradient checkpointing, we drastically reduce memory usage, making it possible to train a large-scale quantum machine learning model, a 20-qubit, 1,000-layer model with 60,000 parameters, using 1,000 samples in approximately 20 minutes. This implies that we can train the model on large datasets, consisting of tens of thousands of samples, such as MNIST or CIFAR-10, within a realistic time frame (e.g., 20 hours per epoch). In this way, our proposed method drastically accelerates classical simulation of quantum machine learning, making a significant contribution to quantum machine learning research and variational quantum algorithms, such as verifying algorithms on large datasets or investigating learning theories of deep quantum circuits like barren plateau.