Measurements With A Quantum Vision Transformer: A Naive Approach

Abstract

In mainstream machine learning, transformers are gaining widespread usage. As Vision Transformers rise in popularity in computer vision, they now aim to tackle a wide variety of machine learning applications. In particular, transformers for High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments continue to be investigated for tasks including jet tagging, particle reconstruction, and pile-up mitigation. An improved Quantum Vision Transformer (QViT) with a quantum-enhanced self-attention mechanism is introduced and discussed. A shallow circuit is proposed for each component of self-attention to leverage current Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. Variations of the hybrid architecture/model are explored and analyzed. The results demonstrate a successful proof of concept for the QViT, and establish a competitive performance benchmark for the proposed design and implementation. The findings also provide strong motivation to experiment with different architectures, hyperparameters, and datasets, setting the stage for implementation in HEP environments where transformers are increasingly used in state of the art machine learning solutions.