  Mainstream machine-learning techniques such as deep learning and
probabilistic programming rely heavily on sampling from generally intractable
probability distributions. There is increasing interest in the potential
advantages of using quantum computing technologies as sampling engines to speed
up these tasks or to make them more effective. However, some pressing
challenges in state-of-the-art quantum annealers have to be overcome before we
can assess their actual performance. The sparse connectivity, resulting from
the local interaction between quantum bits in physical hardware
implementations, is considered the most severe limitation to the quality of
constructing powerful generative unsupervised machine-learning models. Here we
use embedding techniques to add redundancy to data sets, allowing us to
increase the modeling capacity of quantum annealers. We illustrate our findings
by training hardware-embedded graphical models on a binarized data set of
handwritten digits and two synthetic data sets in experiments with up to 940
quantum bits. Our model can be trained in quantum hardware without full
knowledge of the effective parameters specifying the corresponding quantum
Gibbs-like distribution; therefore, this approach avoids the need to infer the
effective temperature at each iteration, speeding up learning; it also
mitigates the effect of noise in the control parameters, making it robust to
deviations from the reference Gibbs distribution. Our approach demonstrates the
feasibility of using quantum annealers for implementing generative models, and
it provides a suitable framework for benchmarking these quantum technologies on
machine-learning-related tasks.
