QKSAN: A Quantum Kernel Self-Attention Network

Self-Attention Mechanism (SAM) is skilled at extracting important information from the interior of data to improve the computational efficiency of models. Nevertheless, many Quantum Machine Learning (QML) models lack the ability to distinguish the intrinsic connections of information like SAM, which limits their effectiveness on massive high-dimensional quantum data. To address this issue, a Quantum Kernel Self-Attention Mechanism (QKSAM) is introduced, which combines the data representation benefit of Quantum Kernel Methods (QKM) with the efficient information extraction capability of SAM. A Quantum Kernel Self-Attention Network (QKSAN) framework is built based on QKSAM, with Deferred Measurement Principle (DMP) and conditional measurement techniques, which releases half of the quantum resources with probabilistic measurements during computation. The Quantum Kernel Self-Attention Score (QKSAS) determines the measurement conditions and reflects the probabilistic nature of quantum systems. Finally, four QKSAN models are deployed on the Pennylane platform to perform binary classification on MNIST images. The best-performing among the four models is assessed for noise immunity and learning ability. Remarkably, the potential learning benefit of partial QKSAN models over classical deep learning is that they require few parameters for a high return of 98\% $\pm$ 1\% test and train accuracy, even with highly compressed images. QKSAN lays the foundation for future quantum computers to perform machine learning on massive amounts of data, while driving advances in areas such as quantum Natural Language Processing (NLP).