Learning quantum finite automata with queries

Abstract

Learning finite automata (termed as model learning) has become an important field in machine learning and has been useful realistic applications. Quantum finite automata (QFA) are simple models of quantum computers with finite memory. Due to their simplicity, QFA have well physical realizability, but one-way QFA still have essential advantages over classical finite automata with regard to state complexity (two-way QFA are more powerful than classical finite automata in computation ability as well). As a different problem in quantum learning theory and quantum machine learning, in this paper, our purpose is to initiate the study of learning QFA with queries (naturally it may be termed as quantum model learning), and the main results are regarding learning two basic one-way QFA (1QFA): (1) we propose a learning algorithm for measure-once 1QFA (MO-1QFA) with query complexity of polynomial time and (2) we propose a learning algorithm for measure-many 1QFA (MM-1QFA) with query complexity of polynomial time, as well.