Combining variational quantum circuits with classical neural network models is a potential direction for quantum natural language processing (QNLP) in the NISQ (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) era. We propose a hybrid classical-quantum neural network that enhances a transformer architecture in two key ways: first, by incorporating optimized variational quantum circuits into the self-attention and multilayer perceptron components, and second, by integrating a hybrid convolutional module for effective dimensionality reduction which can reduce the quantum resources required for subsequent layers and enhances the model’s trainability by mitigating issues like the barren plateau phenomenon, thus making it feasible to construct a deeper and more powerful network architecture. Our experiments on three widely-used sentiment analysis datasets demonstrate that the proposed model achieves comparable or even superior performance in terms of accuracy and F1 score compared to classical transformer-based sentiment classification models with similar structures, while reducing the number of parameters through the utilization of quantum advantages.
Liu et al. (Tue,) studied this question.