Reference · 2018

Barren plateaus in quantum neural network training landscapes

McClean, J. R., Boixo, S., Smelyanskiy, V. N., Babbush, R., & Neven, H. (2018). Barren plateaus in quantum neural network training landscapes. Nature Communications, 9, 4812.

DOI arXiv Record link

Authors: Jarrod R. McClean; Sergio Boixo; Vadim N. Smelyanskiy; Ryan Babbush; Hartmut Neven
Venue: Nature Communications 9, 4812

Shows that for a wide class of random parameterized quantum circuits, the probability of a non-zero gradient at fixed precision is exponentially small in the number of qubits. Cited on VQE and in the opening digest as a limit on hardware-efficient ansatzes, not as a theorem that every variational algorithm fails.

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Chemistrytopic
Variational quantum eigensolveralgorithm
What the source papers claimdigest

Updated 7 Oct 2026.