- Access by Xinjiang University
Quantum phase recognition via swap-test-based correlation mechanism
Phys. Rev. A 113, 062403 – Published 1 June, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/rcjd-bgdb
Abstract
Quantum phase transitions in many-body systems are fundamentally characterized by complex-correlation structures, which pose computational challenges for conventional methods in large systems. To address this, we propose a hybrid quantum-classical model inspired by quantum transformer attention mechanisms. This model employs a swap-test-based correlation, together with a parameterized quantum circuit, to perform ground-state classification. Benchmarked on the cluster-Ising model with system sizes of 9 and 15 qubits, the model achieves high classification accuracy with less than 100 training data points and demonstrates robustness against variations in the training set. Further analysis reveals that the model successfully captures phase-sensitive features and characteristic physical length scales, offering a scalable and data-efficient approach for quantum phase recognition in complex many-body systems.
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Article Text
References (75)
- S. Sachdev, Quantum Phase Transitions, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011).
- M. Vojta, Quantum phase transitions, Rep. Prog. Phys. 66, 2069 (2003).
- S. L. Sondhi, S. M. Girvin, J. P. Carini, and D. Shahar, Continuous quantum phase transitions, Rev. Mod. Phys. 69, 315 (1997).
- L. Amico, R. Fazio, A. Osterloh, and V. Vedral, Entanglement in many-body systems, Rev. Mod. Phys. 80, 517 (2008).
- T. J. Osborne and M. A. Nielsen, Entanglement in a simple quantum phase transition, Phys. Rev. A 66, 032110 (2002).
- A. Osterloh, L. Amico, G. Falci, and R. Fazio, Scaling of entanglement close to a quantum phase transition, Nature (London) 416, 608 (2002).
- N. Goldenfeld, Lectures on Phase Transitions and the Renormalization Group (CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 2018).
- D. Malpetti and T. Roscilde, Quantum mean-field approximation for lattice quantum models: Truncating quantum correlations and retaining classical ones, Phys. Rev. B 95, 075112 (2017).
- W. Kohn, Nobel Lecture: Electronic structure of matter—wave functions and density functionals, Rev. Mod. Phys. 71, 1253 (1999).
- N. Schuch and F. Verstraete, Computational complexity of interacting electrons and fundamental limitations of density functional theory, Nat. Phys. 5, 732 (2009).
- S. R. White, Density matrix formulation for quantum renormalization groups, Phys. Rev. Lett. 69, 2863 (1992).
- S. R. White, Density-matrix algorithms for quantum renormalization groups, Phys. Rev. B 48, 10345 (1993).
- F. Becca and S. Sorella, Quantum Monte Carlo Approaches for Correlated Systems (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017).
- J. Carlson, S. Gandolfi, F. Pederiva, S. C. Pieper, R. Schiavilla, K. E. Schmidt, and R. B. Wiringa, Quantum Monte Carlo methods for nuclear physics, Rev. Mod. Phys. 87, 1067 (2015).
- J. Eisert, M. Cramer, and M. B. Plenio, Colloquium: Area laws for the entanglement entropy, Rev. Mod. Phys. 82, 277 (2010).
- M. Troyer and U.-J. Wiese, Computational complexity and fundamental limitations to fermionic quantum Monte Carlo simulations, Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 170201 (2005).
- R. P. Feynman, Simulating physics with computers, in Feynman and Computation, edited by A. J. G. Hey (CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 2018), pp. 133–153.
- B. Fauseweh, Quantum many-body simulations on digital quantum computers: State-of-the-art and future challenges, Nat. Commun. 15, 2123 (2024).
- A. Peruzzo, J. McClean, P. Shadbolt, M.-H. Yung, X.-Q. Zhou, P. J. Love, A. Aspuru-Guzik, and J. L. O'brien, A variational eigenvalue solver on a photonic quantum processor, Nat. Commun. 5, 4213 (2014).
- J. Tilly, H. Chen, S. Cao, D. Picozzi, K. Setia, Y. Li, E. Grant, L. Wossnig, I. Rungger, G. H. Booth, and J. Tennyson, The variational quantum eigensolver: A review of methods and best practices, Phys. Rep. 986, 1 (2022).
- H.-Y. Huang, R. Kueng, and J. Preskill, Predicting many properties of a quantum system from very few measurements, Nat. Phys. 16, 1050 (2020).
- H.-Y. Huang, R. Kueng, G. Torlai, V. V. Albert, and J. Preskill, Provably efficient machine learning for quantum many-body problems, Science 377, eabk3333 (2022).
- G. Carleo, I. Cirac, K. Cranmer, L. Daudet, M. Schuld, N. Tishby, L. Vogt-Maranto, and L. Zdeborová, Machine learning and the physical sciences, Rev. Mod. Phys. 91, 045002 (2019).
- E. van Nieuwenburg, Y.-H. Liu, and S. Huber, Learning phase transitions by confusion, Nat. Phys. 13, 435 (2017).
- J. Carrasquilla and R. G. Melko, Machine learning phases of matter, Nat. Phys. 13, 431 (2017).
- F. Schindler, N. Regnault, and T. Neupert, Probing many-body localization with neural networks, Phys. Rev. B 95, 245134 (2017).
- E. Greplova, A. Valenti, G. Boschung, F. Schäfer, N. Lörch, and S. D. Huber, Unsupervised identification of topological phase transitions using predictive models, New J. Phys. 22, 045003 (2020).
- D.-L. Deng, X. Li, and S. Das Sarma, Machine learning topological states, Phys. Rev. B 96, 195145 (2017).
- J. Biamonte, P. Wittek, N. Pancotti, P. Rebentrost, N. Wiebe, and S. Lloyd, Quantum machine learning, Nature (London) 549, 195 (2017).
- M. Schuld, I. Sinayskiy, and F. Petruccione, An introduction to quantum machine learning, Contemp. Phys. 56, 172 (2015).
- M. Schuld and F. Petruccione, Supervised Learning with Quantum Computers, Quantum Science and Technology (Springer, Cham, 2018).
- V. Dunjko and H. J. Briegel, Machine learning & artificial intelligence in the quantum domain: A review of recent progress, Rep. Prog. Phys. 81, 074001 (2018).
- Y. Du, Z. Tu, X. Yuan, and D. Tao, Efficient measure for the expressivity of variational quantum algorithms, Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 080506 (2022).
- A. Abbas, D. Sutter, C. Zoufal, A. Lucchi, A. Figalli, and S. Woerner, The power of quantum neural networks, Nat. Comput. Sci. 1, 403 (2021).
- Z. Holmes, K. Sharma, M. Cerezo, and P. J. Coles, Connecting ansatz expressibility to gradient magnitudes and barren plateaus, PRX Quantum 3, 010313 (2022).
- H.-Y. Huang, M. Broughton, J. Cotler, S. Chen, J. Li, M. Mohseni, H. Neven, R. Babbush, R. Kueng, J. Preskill, and J. R. McClean, Quantum advantage in learning from experiments, Science 376, 1182 (2022).
- Y. Liu, S. Arunachalam, and K. Temme, A rigorous and robust quantum speed-up in supervised machine learning, Nat. Phys. 17, 1013 (2021).
- E. Farhi and H. Neven, Classification with quantum neural networks on near term processors, arXiv:1802.06002.
- I. Cong, S. Choi, and M. D. Lukin, Quantum convolutional neural networks, Nat. Phys. 15, 1273 (2019).
- J. R. McClean, S. Boixo, V. N. Smelyanskiy, R. Babbush, and H. Neven, Barren plateaus in quantum neural network training landscapes, Nat. Commun. 9, 4812 (2018).
- A. Pesah, M. Cerezo, S. Wang, T. Volkoff, A. T. Sornborger, and P. J. Coles, Absence of barren plateaus in quantum convolutional neural networks, Phys. Rev. X 11, 041011 (2021).
- X. Li, D. Zhang, and Z.-Q. Yin, Unsupervised detection of topological phase transitions with a quantum reservoir, Phys. Rev. A 113, 012422 (2026).
- D. Bahdanau, K. Cho, and Y. Bengio, Neural machine translation by jointly learning to align and translate, in International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) (2015).
- A. Vaswani, N. Shazeer, N. Parmar, J. Uszkoreit, L. Jones, A. N. Gomez, Ł. Kaiser, and I. Polosukhin, Attention is all you need, in NIPS'17: Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (ACM Digital, New York, 2017), pp. 6000–6010.
- H. Zhang, Q. Zhao, M. Zhou, L. Feng, D. Niyato, S. Zheng, and L. Chen, A survey of quantum transformers: Architectures, challenges and outlooks, arXiv:2504.03192.
- G. Li, X. Zhao, and X. Wang, Quantum self-attention neural networks for text classification, Sci. China Inf. Sci. 67, 142501 (2024).
- C. Xue, Z.-Y. Chen, X.-N. Zhuang, Y.-J. Wang, T.-P. Sun, J.-C. Wang, H.-Y. Liu, Y.-C. Wu, Z.-L. Wang, and G.-P. Guo, End-to-end quantum vision transformer: Towards practical quantum speedup in large-scale models, arXiv:2402.18940.
- H. Zhang, Q. Zhao, M. Zhou, and L. Feng, HQViT: Hybrid quantum vision transformer for image classification, arXiv:2504.02730.
- F. Chen, Q. Zhao, L. Feng, C. Chen, Y. Lin, and J. Lin, Quantum mixed-state self-attention network, Neural Networks 185, 107123 (2025).
- J. He, Y. Kan, and C. Xue, Training quantum self-attention model in near-term quantum computer, in 16th International Conference on Wireless Communications and Signal Processing (WCSP) (IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, 2024), pp. 139–144.
- G.-L. Long and Y. Liu, Duality computing in quantum computers, Commun. Theor. Phys. 50, 1303 (2008).
- G.-L. Long, Y. Liu, and C. Wang, Allowable generalized quantum gates, Commun. Theor. Phys. 51, 65 (2009).
- J. Heredge, M. West, L. Hollenberg, and M. Sevior, Nonunitary quantum machine learning, Phys. Rev. Appl. 23, 044046 (2025).
- A. M. Childs and N. Wiebe, Hamiltonian simulation using linear combinations of unitary operations, Quantum Inf. Comput. 12, 901 (2012).
- A. Gilyén, Y. Su, G. H. Low, and N. Wiebe, Quantum singular value transformation and beyond: Exponential improvements for quantum matrix arithmetics, in STOC 2019: Proceedings of the 51st Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing (ACM Digital, New York, 2019), pp. 193–204.
- E. A. Cherrat, I. Kerenidis, N. Mathur, J. Landman, M. Strahm, and Y. Y. Li, Quantum vision transformers, Quantum 8, 1265 (2024).
- N. Khatri, G. Matos, L. Coopmans, and S. Clark, Quixer: A quantum transformer model, arXiv:2406.04305.
- M. Comajoan Cara, G. R. Dahale, Z. Dong, R. T. Forestano, S. Gleyzer, D. Justice, K. Kong, T. Magorsch, K. T. Matchev, K. Matcheva, and E. B. Unlu, Quantum vision transformers for quark–gluon classification, Axioms 13, 323 (2024).
- E. B. Unlu, M. Comajoan Cara, G. R. Dahale, Z. Dong, R. T. Forestano, S. Gleyzer, D. Justice, K. Kong, T. Magorsch, K. T. Matchev, and K. Matcheva, Hybrid quantum vision transformers for event classification in high energy physics, Axioms 13, 187 (2024).
- S. Sim, P. D. Johnson, and A. Aspuru‐Guzik, Expressibility and entangling capability of parameterized quantum circuits for hybrid quantum‐classical algorithms, Adv. Quantum Technol. 2, 1900070 (2019).
- P. Smacchia, L. Amico, P. Facchi, R. Fazio, G. Florio, S. Pascazio, and V. Vedral, Statistical mechanics of the cluster Ising model, Phys. Rev. A 84, 022304 (2011).
- R. Verresen, R. Moessner, and F. Pollmann, One-dimensional symmetry protected topological phases and their transitions, Phys. Rev. B 96, 165124 (2017).
- F. D. M. Haldane, Nonlinear field theory of large-spin Heisenberg antiferromagnets: Semiclassically quantized solitons of the one-dimensional easy-axis Néel state, Phys. Rev. Lett. 50, 1153 (1983).
- F. Pollmann and A. M. Turner, Detection of symmetry-protected topological phases in one dimension, Phys. Rev. B 86, 125441 (2012).
- A. Javadi-Abhari, M. Treinish, K. Krsulich, C. J. Wood, J. Lishman, J. Gacon, S. Martiel, P. D. Nation, L. S. Bishop, A. W. Cross, B. R. Johnson, and J. M. Gambetta, Quantum computing with Qiskit, arXiv:2405.08810.
- V. Bergholm, J. Izaac, M. Schuld, C. Gogolin, S. Ahmed, V. Ajith, M. S. Alam, G. Alonso-Linaje, B. AkashNarayanan, A. Asadi, et al., PennyLane: Automatic differentiation of hybrid quantum-classical computations, arXiv:1811.04968.
- M. C. Caro, H.-Y. Huang, M. Cerezo, K. Sharma, A. Sornborger, L. Cincio, and P. J. Coles, Generalization in quantum machine learning from few training data, Nat. Commun. 13, 4919 (2022).
- D. Malpetti and T. Roscilde, Quantum correlations, separability, and quantum coherence length in equilibrium many-body systems, Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 130401 (2016).
- Y.-J. Liu, A. Smith, M. Knap, and F. Pollmann, Model-independent learning of quantum phases of matter with quantum convolutional neural networks, Phys. Rev. Lett. 130, 220603 (2023).
- M. Caron, H. Touvron, I. Misra, H. Jegou, J. Mairal, P. Bojanowski, and A. Joulin, Emerging properties in self-supervised vision transformers, in 2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) (IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, 2021), pp. 9630–9640.
- Y. Shao, F. Wei, S. Cheng, and Z. Liu, Simulating noisy variational quantum algorithms: A polynomial approach, Phys. Rev. Lett. 133, 120603 (2024).
- J. Preskill, Quantum computing in the NISQ era and beyond, Quantum 2, 79 (2018).
- A. M. Smaldone, Y. Shee, G. W. Kyro, M. H. Farag, Z. Chandani, E. Kyoseva, and V. S. Batista, A hybrid transformer architecture with a quantized self-attention mechanism applied to molecular generation, J. Chem. Theory Comput. 21, 5143 (2025).
- R.-X. Zhao, J. Shi, and X. Li, QKSAN: A quantum kernel self-attention network, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 46, 10184 (2024).
- Quantum phase recognition via swap-test-based correlation mechanism, GitHub, 2026, https://github.com/JIN88512/QPR-via-swap.