LAUSR

In this article, we introduce a new approach towards the statistical learning problem $$\mathrm{argmin}_{\rho (\theta ) \in {\mathcal {P}}_{\theta }} W_{Q}^2 (\rho _{\star },\rho (\theta ))$$ argmin ρ ( θ ) ∈ P θ W Q 2 ( ρ ⋆ , ρ ( θ ) ) to approximate a target quantum state $$\rho _{\star }$$ ρ ⋆ by a set of parametrized quantum states $$\rho (\theta )$$ ρ ( θ ) in a quantum $$L^2$$ L 2 -Wasserstein metric. We solve this estimation problem by considering Wasserstein natural gradient flows for density operators on finite-dimensional $$C^*$$ C ∗ algebras. For continuous parametric models of density operators, we pull back the quantum Wasserstein metric such that the parameter space becomes a Riemannian manifold with quantum Wasserstein information matrix. Using a quantum analogue of the Benamou–Brenier formula, we derive a natural gradient flow on the parameter space. We also discuss certain continuous-variable quantum states by studying the transport of the associated Wigner probability distributions.