Quantum Down Sampling Filter for Variational Auto-encoder

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are fundamental for generative modeling and image reconstruction, yet their performance often struggles to maintain high fidelity in reconstructions. This study introduces a hybrid model, quantum variational autoencoder (Q-VAE), which integrates quantum encoding within the encoder while utilizing fully connected layers to extract meaningful representations. The decoder uses transposed convolution layers for up-sampling. The Q-VAE is evaluated against the classical VAE and the classical direct-passing VAE, which utilizes windowed pooling filters. Results on the MNIST and USPS datasets demonstrate that Q-VAE consistently outperforms classical approaches, achieving lower Fr\'echet inception distance scores, thereby indicating superior image fidelity and enhanced reconstruction quality. These findings highlight the potential of Q-VAE for high-quality synthetic data generation and improved image reconstruction in generative models.