Hybrid Classical-Quantum Variational Autoencoder for Neural Topic Modeling
Neural topic models enable scalable semantic discovery, but their integration with quantum hardware remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a proof-of-concept hybrid classical-quantum variational autoencoder (VAE) for topic modeling, embedding parameterized quantum circuits within the VAE inference network while retaining a classical topic-word decoder. To address quantum hardware resource constraints, a modified Gaussian Softmax posterior is proposed that decouples latent space dimensionality from the number of topics, enabling operation on a 10-qubit quantum device. On the AgNews dataset, the hybrid VAE outperforms state-of-the-art neural topic models, achieving a C_v coherence score of 0.71 and NPMI of 0.20 while preserving high topic diversity. A fully classical variant also outperforms SOTA models, showing clear class separation in latent space. These results demonstrate the computational viability of hybrid VAEs on NISQ-era devices and point to a promising direction for quantum-enhanced topic modeling.
[2606.13852] Hybrid Classical-Quantum Variational Autoencoder for Neural Topic Modeling
[Submitted on 11 Jun 2026]
Title:Hybrid Classical-Quantum Variational Autoencoder for Neural Topic Modeling
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Abstract:Neural topic models enable scalable semantic discovery, but their integration with quantum hardware remains largely unexplored. We present a proof-of-concept hybrid classical-quantum variational autoencoder (VAE) for topic modeling, embedding parameterized quantum circuits within the VAE inference network while retaining a classical topic-word decoder. To address the resource constraints of quantum hardware, we propose a modified Gaussian Softmax posterior that decouples latent space dimensionality from the number of topics to be extracted, enabling the model to operate with a low-resource 10-qubit quantum device. On the AgNews dataset, the hybrid VAE outperforms state-of-the-art neural topic models (NTMs), reaching a $C_v$ coherence score of 0.71 and an NPMI score of 0.20 while preserving high topic diversity. For comparison, we also construct a fully classical variant, which also outperforms state-of-the-art models on AgNews and exhibits clear class separation in the latent space. These results demonstrate that hybrid VAEs are computationally viable even on NISQ-era devices and represent a promising direction for quantum-enhanced topic modeling.
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.13852 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2606.13852v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.13852
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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From: Ivan Kankeu [view email] [v1] Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:31:46 UTC (4,099 KB)
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