Bio-Inspired Algorithms for Adaptive Quantum Machine Learning

Abstract

Adaptive quantum machine learning (QML) represents an exciting frontier at the intersection of quantum computing and classical bio-inspired optimization. The constraints of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices—limited qubit counts, significant decoherence, and measurement uncertainties—pose formidable challenges to training parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) using traditional gradient-based methods. To overcome these hurdles, we propose a novel Adaptive PSO–QML framework that integrates a particle swarm optimization (PSO)–inspired algorithm with dynamic hyperparameter adjustment, enabling real-time tuning of PQC parameters based on performance feedback. Unlike static optimizers, our approach continuously adapts its inertia weight and cognitive/social coefficients to balance exploration and exploitation, responding to stagnation or rapid improvement in measured fitness. We evaluate this hybrid algorithm on two benchmark classification tasks: the classical Iris dataset encoded into a 2-qubit circuit and a quantum-encoded subset of the MNIST dataset on 4 qubits. Our experiments, conducted on the Qiskit Aer simulator under realistic noise models (depolarizing, amplitude damping, and mixed), demonstrate that Adaptive PSO–QML achieves an average accuracy improvement of 12% over fixed-parameter PSO and 15% over Adam-based gradient descent, with p-values below 0.01 across paired t-tests. Statistical analysis summarized in Table 1 confirms the significance of these gains. Detailed simulation research further reveals that the adaptive mechanism not only accelerates convergence by approximately 30%—reducing total circuit evaluations—but also exhibits robust performance across varying circuit depths (1–3 entangling layers) and noise intensities. Our findings suggest that bio-inspired adaptation is a powerful tool for mitigating barren plateaus and noise effects in NISQ-era QML, paving the way for scalable quantum advantage in near-term hardware.