Quantum Recurrent Unit: A Parameter-Efficient Quantum Neural Network Architecture for NISQ Devices

The rapid growth of modern machine learning (ML) models presents fundamental challenges in parameter efficiency and computational resource requirements. This study introduces the Quantum Recurrent Unit (QRU), a novel quantum neural network (NN) architecture specifically designed to address these challenges while remaining compatible with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. QRU leverages quantum controlled-SWAP (C-SWAP; Fredkin) gates to implement an information selection mechanism inspired by classical Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs), enabling selective processing of temporal information via quantum operations. Through its innovative recurrent architecture featuring measurement results feedforward state propagation and shared parameters across time steps, QRU achieves constant circuit depth and constant parameter count regardless of input sequence length, effectively circumventing stringent NISQ hardware constraints. We systematically validate QRU through three progressive experiments: (1) oscillatory behavior prediction, where 72-parameter QRU matches 197-parameter classical GRU performance; (2) Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer classification, where 35 parameters achieve 96.13% accuracy comparable to 167-parameter artificial NNs; and (3) MNIST handwritten digit recognition, where 132 parameters reach 98.05% accuracy, outperforming a 27,265-parameter convolutional NN. These results demonstrate that QRU consistently achieves comparable or superior performance with significantly fewer parameters than classical NNs while maintaining constant quantum circuit depth. The architecture's quantum-native design, combining C-SWAP-based information selection with novel recurrent processing, suggests QRU's potential as a fundamental building block for next-generation ML systems, offering a promising pathway toward more efficient and scalable quantum ML architectures.