Quantum Circuits in Diffusion Models: A Fair-Comparison Study and a Mechanistic Analysis of Angle-Embedding Failures
We study the integration of variational quantum circuits (VQCs) into diffusion models through a squeeze-and-excitation (SE) channel-modulation scaffold that isolates the quantum contribution. Using a role-matched classical control and multi-seed significance testing across DDPM and latent diffusion on MNIST and CIFAR-10, with a score-based NCSN study on MNIST, we find that quantum cores achieve comparable mean FID to the classical control across DDPM and latent diffusion, while paired sampling-seed tests for EfficientSU2 detect no statistically significant difference. Although the quantum cores use $4.5$--$9\times$ fewer core parameters than the role-matched control, parameter-matched cla...
| Authors | Jaeuk Kim, Sanghoon Yoo |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 10 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 July 2026 |
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