arXiv:2603.09645v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Photonic Quantum Machine Learning (PQML) is an emerging method to implement scalable, energy-efficient quantum information processing by combining photonic quantum computing technologies with machine learning techniques. The features of photonic technologies offer several benefits: room-temperature operation; fast (low delay) processing of signals; and the possibility of representing computations in high-dimensional (Hilbert) spaces. This makes photonic technologies a good candidate for the near-term development of quantum devices. However, noise is still a major limiting factor for the performance, reliability, and scalability of PQML implementations. This review provides a detailed and systematic analysis of the sources of noise that will affect PQML implementations. We will present an overview of the principal photonic quantum computer designs and summarize the many different types of quantum machine learning algorithms that have been successfully implemented using photonic quantum computer architectures such as variational quantum circuits, quantum neural networks, and quantum support vector machines. We identify and categorize the primary sources of noise within photonic quantum systems and how these sources of noise behave algorithm-specifically with respect to degrading the accuracy of learning, unstable training, and slower convergence than expected. Additionally, we review traditional and advanced techniques for characterizing noise and provide an extensive survey of strategies for mitigating the effects of noise on learning performance. Finally, we discuss recent advances that demonstrate PQML’s capability to operate in real-world settings with realistic noise conditions and future obstacles that will challenge the use of PQML as an effective quantum processing platform.