Local and Multi-Scale Strategies to Mitigate Exponential Concentration in Quantum Kernels

Abstract:Fidelity-based quantum kernels provide a direct interface between quantum feature maps and classical kernel methods, but they can exhibit exponential concentration: with increasing system size or circuit expressivity, the Gram matrix approaches the identity and suppresses informative similarity structure. We present an empirical study of two mitigation strategies implemented in Qiskit: (i) local (patch-wise) kernels that aggregate subsystem similarities, and (ii) multi-scale kernels that mix local and global similarity across patch granularities. We benchmark baseline, local, and multi-scale kernels under matched preprocessing, splits, and SVM protocols on several tabular datasets, sweeping the feature dimension $d\in\{4,6,\dots,20\}$. We report concentration diagnostics based on off-diagonal kernel statistics, spectral richness via effective rank, and centered alignment with labels. Across datasets, local and multi-scale constructions consistently mitigate concentration and yield richer kernel spectra relative to the global fidelity baseline, while the impact on classification accuracy depends on the dataset and dimension.

18 pages, 10 figures. Revised theoretical presentation and proofs; clarified notation, experimental protocol, and figure captions; updated references. Experimental results and main conclusions unchanged

arXiv:2602.16097 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2602.16097v2 [quant-ph] for this version)