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arXiv:1810.10310

QuanFuzz: Fuzz Testing of Quantum Program

Jiyuan Wang, Ming Yuan Gao, Yu Jiang, Jian–Guang Lou, Yue Gao, Dongmei Zhang, Jiaguang Sun

Published Oct 16, 2018• 17 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Nowadays, quantum program is widely used and quickly developed. However, the absence of testing methodology restricts their quality. Different input format and operator from traditional program make this issue hard to resolve. In this paper, we present QuanFuzz, a search-based test input generator for quantum program. We define the quantum sensitive information to evaluate test input for quantum program and use matrix generator to generate test cases with higher coverage. First, we extract quantum sensitive information -- measurement operations on those quantum registers and the sensitive branches associated with those measurement results, from the quantum source code. Then, we use the sensitive information guided algorithm to mutate the initial input matrix and select those matrices which improve the probability weight for a value of the quantum register to trigger the sensitive branch. The process keeps iterating until the sensitive branch triggered. We tested QuanFuzz on benchmarks and acquired 20% - 60% more coverage compared to traditional testing input generation.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1810.10310

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Nowadays, quantum program is widely used and quickly developed. However, the absence of testing methodology restricts their quality. Different input format and operator from traditional program make this issue hard to resolve. In this paper, we present QuanFuzz, a search-based test input generator for quantum program. We define the quantum sensitive information to evaluate test input for quantum program and use matrix generator to generate test cases with higher coverage. First, we extract quantum sensitive information -- measurement operations on those quantum registers and the sensitive branches associated with those measurement results, from the quantum source code. Then, we use the sensitive information guided algorithm to mutate the initial input matrix and select those matrices which improve the probability weight for a value of the quantum register to trigger the sensitive branch. The process keeps iterating until the sensitive branch triggered. We tested QuanFuzz on benchmarks and acquired 20% - 60% more coverage compared to traditional testing input generation.
Nowadays, quantum program is widely used and quickly developed. However, the absence of testing methodology restricts their quality. Different input format and operator from traditional program make this issue hard to resolve. In this paper, we present QuanFuzz, a search-based test input generator for quantum program. We define the quantum sensitive information to evaluate test input for quantum program and use matrix generator to generate test cases with higher coverage. Because of the impossibility of copying qubit, we record the operations which lead initial seeds to test inputs instead of recording qubits themselves. First, we extract quantum sensitive information - measurement operations on those quantum registers and the sensitive branches associated with those measurement results, from the quantum source code. Then, we use the sensitive information guided algorithm to mutate the initial input matrix and select those matrices which improve the probability weight for a value of the quantum register to trigger the sensitive branch. QuanFuzz on benchmarks and acquired 20% - 60% more coverage compared to traditional testing methods.
As quantum computing continually improves, ensuring the reliability and correctness of quantum libraries has become increasingly critical. To this end, many LLM-based fuzzing approaches towards quantum libraries have been proposed to uncover potential bugs. However, these methods still suffer from limitations such as insufficient flexibility and low efficiency, which hinder the progress of the quantum computing field. To address these challenges, we propose KQFuzz, a novel knowledge-guided fuzzer for quantum libraries. It leverages comprehensive codebase knowledge to ground LLM-based test generation, synergizing this with fitness-guided evaluation and two-level mutations to explore complex execution paths and trigger potential bugs. Firstly, KQFuzz introduces a novel prompting scheme tailored to quantum programs, which strategically incorporates knowledge of the codebase to efficiently generate high-quality quantum seed programs. Moreover, we develop evaluation and mutation strategies to handle the generated seed programs, facilitating efficient fuzzing execution while further enriching the diversity of the resulting test cases. We implement KQFuzz and conduct fuzzing on three popular quantum libraries, including Qiskit, PennyLane, and Cirq. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, with coverage improved by up to 18.44%. During the development of KQFuzz, we discovered 13 bugs, all of which have been confirmed and 12 have already been fixed by the developers.
As quantum computing is still in its infancy, there is an inherent lack of knowledge and technology to test a quantum program properly. In the classical realm, mutation testing has been successfully used to evaluate how well a program's test suite detects seeded faults (i.e., mutants). In this paper, building on the definition of syntactically equivalent quantum operations, we propose a novel set of mutation operators to generate mutants based on qubit measurements and quantum gates. To ease the adoption of quantum mutation testing, we further propose QMUTPY, an extension of the well-known and fully automated open-source mutation tool MUTPY. To evaluate QMUTPY's performance, we conducted a case study on 24 real quantum programs written in IBM's QISKIT library. Furthermore, we show how better test suite coverage and improvements to test assertions can increase the test suites' mutation score and quality. QMUTPY has proven to be an effective quantum mutation tool, providing insight into the current state of quantum tests and how to improve them.
This paper presents the first concolic testing framework explicitly designed for quantum programs. The framework introduces quantum constraint generation methods for quantum control statements that quantify quantum states and offers a symbolization method for quantum variables. Based on this framework, we generate path constraints for each concrete execution path of a quantum program. These constraints guide the exploration of new paths, with a quantum constraint solver determining outcomes to create novel input samples, thereby enhancing branch coverage. Our framework has been implemented in Python and integrated with Qiskit for practical evaluation. Experimental results show that our concolic testing framework improves branch coverage, generates high-quality quantum input samples, and detects bugs, demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency in quantum programming and bug detection. Regarding branch coverage, our framework achieves more than 74.27% on quantum programs with under 5 qubits.
Quantum programs are designed to run on quantum computers, leveraging quantum circuits to solve problems that are intractable for classical machines. As quantum computing advances, ensuring the reliability of quantum programs has become increasingly important. This paper introduces NovaQ, a diversity-guided testing framework for quantum programs. NovaQ combines a distribution-based test case generator with a novelty-driven evaluation module. The generator produces diverse quantum state inputs by mutating circuit parameters, while the evaluator quantifies behavioral novelty based on internal circuit state metrics, including magnitude, phase, and entanglement. By selecting inputs that map to infrequently covered regions in the metric space, NovaQ effectively explores under-tested program behaviors. We evaluate NovaQ on quantum programs of varying sizes and complexities. Experimental results show that NovaQ consistently achieves higher test input diversity and detects more bugs than existing baseline approaches.
The recent fast development of quantum computers breaks several computation limitations that are difficult for conventional computers. Up to the present, although many approaches and tools have been proposed to test quantum programs, the fundamental features of quantum programs, i.e., magnitude, phase, and entanglement, have been largely overlooked, leading to limited fault detection capability and reduced testing effectiveness. To address this problem, we propose an automated testing framework named QURATEST, equipped with three test case generators (including two newly proposed techniques, UCNOT and IQFT in this paper, as well as one based on Random techniques) to test quantum programs. Overall, the proposed generators enable the generation of diverse test inputs by considering the quantum features of quantum programs. In the experiments, we perform an in-depth evaluation of QURATEST from three aspects: generated test case diversity, output coverage of the program under test, and fault detection capability. The results demonstrate the potential of our newly proposed techniques in that IQFT can generate the most diverse test cases regarding magnitude, phase, and entanglement, with 66% cell coverage. Comparatively, the Random approach only has 10% cell coverage. Regarding the evaluations of the output coverage, IQFT can achieve the highest output coverage in 70.2% (33 out of 47) of all quantum programs. In terms of fault detection, UCNOT outperforms the other two techniques. Specifically, the test cases generated by UCNOT have the best mutation score in 88.4% (23 out of 26) quantum programs.