Quantum cloning machines are essential in quantum information processing, finding applications in areas such as quantum communication and cryptographic protocols. However, the fidelity of universal quantum cloning machines diminishes as the dimension of the Hilbert space increases, resulting in significantly lower efficiency when cloning high-dimensional quantum states compared to qubits. In this study, we introduce a Hybrid Quantum Autocloning Machine (HQAM) that combines quantum autoencoding with universal quantum cloning. The core concept involves compressing a high-dimensional quantum state into a lower-dimensional effective subspace through a quantum autoencoder, conducting the cloning process within this reduced subspace, and then reconstructing the state in the original Hilbert space. Our results show that, for input states with a strong overlap with the effective qubit subspace, the HQAM achieves cloning fidelities exceeding the benchmark fidelity of direct qutrit universal cloning and approaching the optimal qubit cloning limit, while maintaining robustness under noise. These findings demonstrate that compression-assisted cloning provides a practical strategy for improving cloning performance in high-dimensional quantum systems and may enable more efficient quantum information processing protocols.
Beh et al. (Mon,) studied this question.