QiMLP: Quantum-inspired Multilayer Perceptron with Strong Correlation Mining and Parameter Compression

Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) is a simple practice of Neural Network (NN) and the cornerstone of research and development of deep learning. Each neuron is connected to all neurons in the previous layer and implements a non-linear mapping through activation functions. MLP can learn complex non-linear relationships among features through the superposition of multiple hidden layers, but it still cannot discover the inherent strong correlation among features. The reason is that each neuron uses a simple weighted summation method to organize all the neurons in the previous layer. Inspired by quantum theory, this paper builds a non-linear NN layer that can mine strong correlations among features based on multi-body quantum systems, and then constructs a multi-layer perceptron, called Quantum-inspired MLP (QiMLP). It is conceivable that QiMLP will have important inspirational significance in reshaping machine learning, deep learning and large language models. We theoretically analyzed the basis for QiMLP to mine strong correlations among features, and implemented experiments on multiple classic deep learning datasets. Experimental results verify that QiMLP not only learns strong correlations among features, but also significantly reduces the number of parameters with hundreds of times improvement.