In this challenge, you will use Pennylane and Amazon Braket to implement a variational quantum classifier (VQC) to take on a supervised learning problem based on the work of Havlíček et al. (2018). Implement each of the four TODOs in vqc_challenge.ipynb to construct and train a QML model to solve the binary classification task. You can use the gen_binary.py script to generate a new train/test dataset, and further test your model.
A central feature of Amazon Braket is that its remote simulator can execute multiple circuits in parallel. This capability can be harnessed in PennyLane during circuit training, which requires lots of variations of a circuit to be executed. Hence, the PennyLane-Braket plugin provides a method for scalable optimization of large circuits with many parameters. After validating your implementation and successfully training using a local simulator, enable qBraid quantum jobs and test your binary classifier on remote quantum hardware using the Amazon Braket Pennylane plugin. See the resources linked below for more.
- To submit your hack, create a pull request from your team's named branch
- Submission PR title format:
[VQC-CHALLENGE] [team-name] [date] - Submissions will be evaluated on a rolling basis
- Each team is allowed one submission per day
A leaderboard will be kept on https://account.qbraid.com/haqs that ranks teams in order of their submitted VQC model accuracy. The leaderboard will be updated every 24 hours with all the submissions from that day. All teams that make a submission, no matter their model's performance, will appear on the leaderboard and therefore be eligable for prizes.
Important: Your final model must be tested with on a remote quantum device using the Amazon Braket Pennylane plugin. Submissions that do not interface with Amazon Braket supported devices will not be eligible to be ranked on the leaderboard.
- Pennylane Key Concepts
- PennyLane-Braket Plugin
- Computing gradients in parallel with Amazon Braket
- Use PennyLane with Amazon Braket
- Amazon Braket examples: hybrid quantum algorithms
- qBraid demo notebooks: quantum jobs
- qBraid CLI: quantum jobs commands
If your team completes the VQC model with 100% test accuracy, you are eligible to move on to the quantum kernel estimator challenge, which will be used as a tie-breaker for those sharing 1st position on the leaderboard. Follow the instructions in kernel_estimator.ipynb, and submit your solution using the PR title format: [KERNEL-ESTIMATOR] [team-name] [date]. Submissions to this challenge will also be added to the leaderboard. If a second tie-breaker is needed between top submissions, the judges will choose the winner based on overall impression of the solution, e.g. is the code well written and easy to follow, is the implementation elegant or brute force, what plots other visualizations are included, etc.
Optional: If you wish to keep the details of your implementation private from other teams, then do not push your changes to kernel_estimator.ipynb to your public fork. Instead, we can review your notebook directly from your Lab filesystem. When you are ready to submit, open a PR with just your plots, and include a comment that gives the qBraid account email address under which we can find your full solution.