News

Google Launches TensorFlow Quantum

• By John K. Waters
• 03/18/2020

Google's new TensorFlow Quantum (TFQ), unveiled last week, is a quantum machine learning library for rapid prototyping of hybrid quantum/classical ML models.

The open source library comes with tools for bringing the quantum computing and machine learning research communities together, the company said, "to control and model natural or artificial quantum systems."

Developed in collaboration among Google's X unit, the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, NASA's Quantum AI Lab, Volkswagen and Google Research, TFQ uses TensorFlow, the popular machine learning development platform, to integrate quantum computing algorithms and logic designed in the Cirq open source quantum circuit library. 

It offers high-level abstractions for the design and implementation of both discriminative and generative quantum-classical models by providing quantum computing primitives compatible with existing TensorFlow APIs, along with high-performance quantum circuit simulators.

"TFQ allows researchers to construct quantum datasets, quantum models, and classical control parameters as tensors in a single computational graph," the Google Research team explained in a blog post. "The outcome of quantum measurements, leading to classical probabilistic events, is obtained by TensorFlow Ops. Training can be done using standard Keras functions."

The team behind TFQ explained their thinking and their goals in a whitepaper, "TensorFlow Quantum: A Software Framework for Quantum Machine Learning."

"TensorFlow Quantum is intended to accelerate the development of quantum machine learning algorithms for a wide array of applications," they wrote. "We hope this framework provides the necessary tools for the quantum computing and machine learning research communities to explore models of both natural and artificial quantum systems, and ultimately discover new quantum algorithms which could potentially yield a quantum advantage."

Google researchers claimed to have reached a major milestone in the evolution of quantum computing called "quantum supremacy" last year. This unofficial designation is earned by computing devices that can solve problems no classical computer can handle.

"Quantum machine learning is a very new and exciting field, so we expect the framework to change with the needs of the research community, and the availability of new quantum hardware," they added.