Organizations: Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece · Eulambia Advanced Technologies Ltd, Agiou Ioannou 24, Ag. Paraskevi, 15342, Greece
Abstract
We investigate variational quantum classifiers (VQCs) for land-cover classification from multispectral satellite imagery, adopting a feature-map perspective in which the quantum circuit defines a nonlinear data embedding while the readout determines how this representation is exploited. Using the EuroSAT-MS dataset, we perform a systematic one-vs-one evaluation across all class pairs under a controlled experimental protocol, comparing classical baselines (logistic regression, SVMs, neural networks) with VQCs employing both linear readout and quantum-kernel SVM strategies. Our results show that, while VQCs with linear readout do not outperform strong classical baselines such as RBF-SVM, the same trained quantum feature map can significantly improve performance when reused within a kernel-based decision framework. A qubit-count sweep further reveals saturation effects consistent with the mismatch between exponential Hilbert space dimension and linear parameter scaling. Overall, our findings highlight that the effectiveness of quantum models depends critically on the interplay between representation and readout, and that meaningful gains may arise from combining learned quantum feature maps with classical decision mechanisms rather than seeking direct replacement of classical models.
Variational quantum circuits (VQCs) are parameterized quantum circuits optimized classically. We propose a hybrid variational quantum circuit (HVQC) extending VQCs with a classical affine post-measurement layer, enabling vector-valued regression without the linear overhead of independent scalar circuits. Theoretically, we show that elementary one-and two-qubit circuits can approximate quadratic functions and products via data re-uploading and entanglement, providing the foundations of the full architecture. Experimentally, on two synthetic image reconstruction datasets and the Friedman1 benchmark (40,568 test samples), our HVQC matches Gaussian Process Regression and outperforms XGBoost and Random Forest. An ablation study confirms that both quantum and classical components are essential, and results highlight the central role of the feature map in hybrid quantum-classical models.
Variational quantum circuits (VQCs) are a leading approach to quantum machine learning on near-term devices, yet it remains unclear which circuit architecture yields the best accuracy-parameter trade-off on classical tabular data. We present a systematic empirical comparison of four VQC families -- multi-layer fully-connected (FC-VQC), residual (ResNet-VQC), hybrid quantum-classical transformer (QT), and fully quantum transformer (FQT) -- across five regression and classification benchmarks. Our key findings are: \textbf{(i)}~FC-VQCs achieve 90-96% of the R2 of attention-based VQCs while using 40-50% fewer parameters, and consistently outperform equal-capacity MLPs (mean R2=0.829 vs.\ MLP720's 0.753 on Boston Housing, 3-seed average); \textbf{(ii)}FC-VQC's Type4 inter-block connectivity provides partial cross-token mixing that approximates the role of attention -- explicit quantum self-attention yields only marginal gains on most datasets while significantly increasing parameter count; \textbf{(iii)}expressibility saturates at circuit depth≈3, explaining why shallow VQCs already cover the Hilbert space effectively; \textbf{(iv)}~LayerNorm on the fully quantum transformer improves classification accuracy, suggesting normalization is important when all operations are quantum; \textbf{(v)}~in our noise study on Boston Housing, FQT degrades gracefully under depolarizing noise while QT collapses. All results are validated across three random seeds. These findings provide practical architectural guidance for deploying VQCs on near-term quantum hardware.
A potential path forward is Quantum Machine Learning (QML), which aims to leverage quantum computing in conjunction with classical machine learning to enhance computing efficiency and the expressiveness of models. In this paper, two different quantum classifiers - Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) and Quantum Kernel Support Vector Machine (QSVM) - are compared with three classical classifiers as baseline classifiers - Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) - on the Breast Cancer Wisconsin dataset. The quantum circuits were created in the PennyLane framework and simulated on a classical backend. However, in terms of accuracy, classical Logistic Regression performed better with an accuracy of 97.8%, classical SVM and QSVM with an accuracy of 95.6% each, although the Quantum VQC achieved a lower accuracy of 88.9% and had a recall of 100% for the benign class, though it correctly identified only 12 of the 17 malignant cases (a malignant-class recall of approximately 70.6%). The drawback of quantum models is the higher training time; however, since the quantum circuit needs to be classically simulated, the quantum SVM took 23.29 seconds compared to less than 0.01 seconds for the classical linear models. These results indicate that for small structured datasets, classifiers based on quantum computing have not yet surpassed well-tuned classical counterparts. In some respects (e.g., benign-class recall), they perform competitively, though not on malignant-class recall, where the VQC in particular performed worse than the classical baselines, which is worth further investigation on real quantum computers.