Deep Variational Quantum Circuits with Barren-Plateau-Free Architectures

Kaining Zhang

Min-Hsiu Hsieh

Dacheng Tao

Date of Publication

February 28, 2026

Centers

Quantum Computing Research Center

Publication Information

Artificial Intelligence Science and Engineering, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 66--84, 2026

Topic

Quantum Computing

Table of Contents

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) with random structures have poor trainability due to the exponentially vanishing gradient as the circuit depth and the qubit number increase. This result leads to a general belief that a deep circuit will not be feasible. In this work, we provide a viable solution to the vanishing gradient problem for deep VQAs with theoretical guarantees. Specifically, we prove that for quantum controlled-layer and quantum residual network (QResNet), architectures, the expectation of the gradient norm can be lower bounded by a value that is independent of the qubit number and the circuit depth. Our results follow from a careful analysis of the gradient behavior on parameter space consisting of rotation angles, as employed in almost all VQAs, instead of relying on impractical 2-design assumptions. We conduct several numerical experiments as verifications, where only our circuits are trainable and converge, while hardware-efficient and random circuits with similar number of parameters in comparison cannot converge.