Quantum Deep Learning: A Comprehensive Review

TL;DR

This comprehensive review of quantum deep learning explores its paradigms, theoretical foundations, experimental progress, and practical applications, assessing quantum advantage and providing guidance for future scalable implementations.

Contribution

It introduces a taxonomy of QDL paradigms, connects theory to experiments across various hardware platforms, and critically evaluates claims of quantum advantage.

Findings

Identifies trade-offs between expressivity and trainability in QDL models.

Provides a systematic assessment of resource requirements for QDL.

Surveys applications across multiple domains with benchmarking against classical methods.

Abstract

Quantum deep learning (QDL) explores the use of both quantum and quantum-inspired resources to determine when deep learning's core capabilities, such as expressivity, generalization, and scalability, can be enhanced based on specific resource constraints. Distinct from broader quantum machine learning, QDL emphasizes compositional depth at the pipeline level and the integration of quantum or quantum-inspired components within end-to-end workflows. This review provides an operational definition of QDL and introduces a taxonomy comprising four primary paradigms: hybrid quantum-classical models, quantum deep neural networks, quantum algorithms for deep learning primitives, and quantum-inspired classical algorithms. Theoretical principles are connected to advanced architectures, software toolchains, and experimental demonstrations across superconducting, trapped-ion, photonic, semiconductor spin, and neutral-atom systems, as well as quantum annealers. Claims of quantum advantage are critically assessed by distinguishing provable complexity-theoretic separations from empirical observations. The analysis characterizes trade-offs between model expressivity, trainability, and classical simulability, while systematically detailing the bottlenecks imposed by optimization landscapes, input-output access models, and hardware constraints. Applications are surveyed in domains encompassing image classification, natural language processing, scientific discovery, quantum data processing, and quantum optimal control, underscoring fair benchmarking against optimized classical counterparts and a comprehensive assessment of resource requirements. This review serves as a tutorial entry point for graduate students while guiding readers to specialized literature. It concludes with a verification-aware roadmap to transition QDL from near-term demonstrations to scalable and fault-tolerant implementations.