Classical Autoencoder Distillation of Quantum Adversarial Manipulations

Abstract

Quantum neural networks have been proven robust against classical adversarial attacks, but their vulnerability against quantum adversarial attacks is still a challenging problem. Here we report a new technique for the distillation of quantum manipulated image datasets by using classical autoencoders. Our technique recovers quantum classifier accuracies when tested under standard machine learning benchmarks utilising MNIST and FMNIST image datasets, and PGD and FGSM adversarial attack settings. Our work highlights a promising pathway to achieve fully robust quantum machine learning in both classical and quantum adversarial scenarios.