Comparison of D-Wave Quantum Annealing and Markov Chain Monte Carlo for Sampling from a Probability Distribution of a Restricted Boltzmann Machine

TL;DR

This study compares D-Wave quantum annealing and classical Gibbs sampling for RBM data, revealing differences in local minima exploration and potential for hybrid approaches to improve sampling quality.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparison of quantum and classical sampling methods for RBMs, highlighting their complementary strengths and limitations.

Findings

D-Wave samples explore more local minima early in training.

Many local minima are uniquely found by one method, not both.

Overlap between methods decreases as training progresses.

Abstract

A local-valley (LV) centered approach to assessing the quality of sampling from Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) was applied to the latest generation of the D-Wave quantum annealer. D-Wave and Gibbs samples from a classically trained RBM were obtained at conditions relevant to the contrastive-divergence-based RBM learning. The samples were compared for the number of the LVs to which they belonged and the energy of the corresponding local minima. No significant (desirable) increase in the number of the LVs has been achieved by decreasing the D-Wave annealing time. At any training epoch, the states sampled by the D-Wave belonged to a somewhat higher number of LVs than in the Gibbs sampling. However, many of those LVs found by the two techniques differed. For high-probability sampled states, the two techniques were (unfavorably) less complementary and more overlapping. Nevertheless, many potentially "important" local minima, i.e., those having intermediate, even if not high, probability values, were found by only one of the two sampling techniques while missed by the other. The two techniques overlapped less at later than earlier training epochs, which is precisely the stage of the training when modest improvements to the sampling quality could make meaningful differences for the RBM trainability. The results of this work may explain the failure of previous investigations to achieve substantial (or any) improvement when using D-Wave-based sampling. However, the results reveal some potential for improvement, e.g., using a combined classical-quantum approach.