Parameter-Efficient Quantum NLP for Paraphrase Detection: Performance, Robustness, and Entanglement

Large language and sentence-embedding models provide rich semantic representations, but their high dimensionality poses a challenge for near-term quantum machine learning (QML), where quantum circuits can process only a limited number of input features. We investigate a hybrid quantum-classical pipeline that transforms high-dimensional sentence embeddings into compact representations for variational quantum classification. The workflow combines a pretrained sentence-embedding model, dimensionality reduction, angle encoding, a variational quantum circuit (VQC), and a classical decision layer. We systematically compare principal component analysis (PCA), neighborhood components analysis (NCA), and linear discriminant analysis (LDA), covering both unsupervised and supervised dimensionality reduction. Using the TREC question-classification dataset, we study the relationship between representation dimensionality, information retention, qubit count, and classification performance. Preliminary PCA experiments reveal a strong information bottleneck: reducing 768-dimensional embeddings to 3, 4, 5, and 8 dimensions retains about 8.2%, 10.2%, 11.9%, and 16.4% of the variance, with corresponding classification accuracies of 50.3%, 51.2%, 57.9%, and 63.4%. In contrast, supervised reduction is substantially more efficient. LDA reaches 85.3% accuracy and NCA reaches 83.1% using only 5 dimensions, under a leakage-free cross-validation protocol, compared with 85.1% for a full 384-dimensional classical baseline. These results indicate that supervised dimensionality reduction can preserve task-relevant information far more effectively than variance-based compression, making compact representations a promising route toward practical hybrid quantum-classical NLP models.

Training variational quantum models requires choosing between parameter-shift gradients, which are exact but cost $O(P)$ forward evaluations, and simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA), which uses only two samples but produces high-variance estimates that can degrade optimisation on small supervised tasks. Whether the cheap gradient is usable depends on the variance that results from different choices of the SPSA perturbation scale, learning rate, and gain-decay schedule. We varied those quantities across a broad grid on a 6-qubit, 60-parameter QNLI classifier and compared the best configurations to parameter-shift AdamW and BuresQNG. AdamW-style SPSA with $c_0=0.01$, $η=0.10$, $γ=0.10$ reached $55\% \pm 11\%$ test accuracy, improving over the default configuration ($49\% \pm 6\%$) but remaining 16-19 percentage points below the parameter-shift baselines because the two-sample SPSA gradient estimate has too much variance for reliable optimisation of 60 parameters in 40 epochs. Classical-gain SPSA and Bures-preconditioned SPSA performed worse, at $51\%$ and $46\%$ respectively. Bures-preconditioning a noisy two-sample SPSA gradient amplifies perturbation noise.

Multi-task learning (MTL) improves generalization and data efficiency by jointly learning related tasks through shared representations. In the widely used hard-parameter-sharing setting, a shared backbone is combined with task-specific prediction heads. However, task-specific parameters can grow rapidly with the number of tasks. Therefore, designing multi-task heads that preserve task specialization while improving parameter efficiency remains a key challenge. In Quantum Machine Learning (QML), variational quantum circuits (VQCs) provide a compact mechanism for mapping classical data to quantum states residing in high-dimensional Hilbert spaces, enabling expressive representations within constrained parameter budgets. We propose a parameter-efficient quantum multi-task learning (QMTL) framework that replaces conventional task-specific linear heads with a fully quantum prediction head in a hybrid architecture. The model consists of a VQC with a shared, task-independent quantum encoding stage, followed by lightweight task-specific ansatz blocks enabling localized task adaptation while maintaining compact parameterization. Under a controlled and capacity-matched formulation where the shared representation dimension grows with the number of tasks, our parameter-scaling analysis demonstrates that a standard classical head exhibits quadratic growth, whereas the proposed quantum head parameter cost scales linearly. We evaluate QMTL on three multi-task benchmarks spanning natural language processing, medical imaging, and multimodal sarcasm detection, where we achieve performance comparable to, and in some cases exceeding, classical hard-parameter-sharing baselines while consistently outperforming existing hybrid quantum MTL models with substantially fewer head parameters. We further demonstrate QMTL's executability on noisy simulators and real quantum hardware, illustrating its feasibility.