Generating probability distributions using variational quantum circuits

Abstract: We use a variational method for generating probability distributions, specifically, the Uniform, the Normal, the Binomial distribution, and the Poisson distribution. To do the same, we use many different architectures for the two, three and four-qubit cases using the Jensen-Shannon divergence as our objective function. We use gradient descent with momentum as our optimization scheme instead of conventionally used gradient descent. To calculate the gradient, we use the parameter shift rule, whose formulation we modify to take the probability values as outputs instead of the conventionally taken expectation values. We see that this method can approximate probability distributions, and there exists a specific architecture which outperforms other architectures, and this architecture depends on the number of qubits. The four, three and two-qubit cases consist of a parameterized layer followed by an entangling layer; a parameterized layer followed by an entangling layer, which is followed by a parameterized layer and only parameterized layers, respectively.