Practical Quantum Reservoir Computing in Rydberg Atom Arrays

Abstract: Quantum reservoir computing (QRC) is a promising quantum machine learning framework for near-term quantum platforms, yet the performance of different QRC architectures under realistic constraints remains largely unexplored. Here, we provide a comparative numerical study of single-step-QRC (SS-QRC) and multi-step-QRC (MS-QRC) architectures implemented on a Rydberg atom array. We demonstrate that while MS-QRC performance is highly sensitive to the underlying dynamical phase of matter and decoherence, SS-QRC exhibits greater robustness. Using the randomized measurement toolbox to mitigate measurement overhead, we reveal that sampling noise undermines the convergence property required for MS-QRC. This leads to a significant reduction in the information processing capacity (IPC) of MS-QRC, deteriorating its performance on nonlinear time-series benchmarks. In contrast, SS-QRC maintains high IPC and accuracy across both temporal and non-temporal tasks. Our results suggest SS-QRC as a preferred candidate for near-term practical applications due to its resilience to system configurations and statistical noise.