On measurement-dependent variance in quantum neural networks

Abstract: Variational quantum circuits have become a widely used tool for performing quantum machine learning (QML) tasks on labeled quantum states. In some specific tasks or for specific variational ansätze, one may perform measurements on a restricted part of the overall input state. This is the case for, e.g., quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNNs), where after each layer of the circuit a subset of qubits of the processed state is measured or traced out, and at the end of the network one typically measures a local observable. In this work, we demonstrate that measuring observables with restricted support results in larger label prediction variance in regression QML tasks. We show that the reason for this is, essentially, the number of distinct eigenvalues of the observable one measures after the application of a variational circuit.