Enhancing Image Recognition Using Gaussian Boson Sampling

Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) is one of the leading approaches for demonstrating quantum computational advantage, but its application to practical real-world problems remains a central challenge. Here, we propose a GBS-based image recognition scheme inspired by extreme learning machine to enhance the performance of perceptron and implement it using our latest GBS device, jiǔzhāng 4.0. By avoiding in situ programmability of the photonic circuit, the scheme substantially reduces experimental overhead while retaining a large, fixed random feature map. Our approach utilizes an 8176-mode temporal-spatial hybrid encoding photonic processor, achieving approximately 2200 average photon clicks in the quantum computational advantage regime. We apply this scheme to classify images from the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets, achieving a testing accuracy of 95.86% on MNIST and 85.95% on Fashion-MNIST, respectively. These results surpass both classical linear-kernel support vector machines and the three previous physical extreme-learning-machine experiments. In addition, we systematically explore the influence of three key hyperparameters and the efficiency of GBS in our experiments. Our results not only demonstrate the potential of GBS in real-world machine learning applications but will also inspire further advancements in powerful machine learning schemes utilizing GBS technology.