Residual Matrix Product State for Machine Learning

Tensor network (TN), which originates from quantum physics, shows broad prospects in classical and quantum machine learning (ML). However, there still exists a considerable gap of accuracy between TN and the sophisticated neural network (NN) models for classical ML. It is still elusive how far TN ML can be improved by, e.g., borrowing the techniques from NN. In this work, we propose the residual matrix product state (ResMPS) by combining the ideas of matrix product state (MPS) and residual NN. ResMPS can be treated as a network where its layers map the "hidden" features to the outputs (e.g., classifications), and the variational parameters of the layers are the functions of the features of samples (e.g., pixels of images). This is essentially different from NN, where the layers map feed-forwardly the features to the output. ResMPS can naturally incorporate with the non-linear activations and dropout layers, and outperforms the state-of-the-art TN models on the efficiency, stability, and expression power. Besides, ResMPS is interpretable from the perspective of polynomial expansion, where the factorization and exponential machines naturally emerge. Our work contributes to connecting and hybridizing neural and tensor networks, which is crucial to understand the working mechanisms further and improve both models' performances.