The design of quantum circuits is often still done manually, for instance by following certain patterns or rule of thumb. While this approach may work well for some problems, it can be a tedious task and present quite the challenge in other situations. Designing the architecture of a circuit for a simple classification problem may be relatively straightforward task, however, creating circuits for more complex problems or that are resilient to certain known problems (e.g. barren plateaus, trainability, etc.) is a different issue. Moreover, efficient state preparation or circuits with low depth are important for virtually most algorithms. In attempts to automate the process of designing circuits, different approaches have been suggested over the years, including genetic algorithms and reinforcement learning. We propose our GA4QCO framework that applies a genetic algorithm to automatically search for quantum circuits that exhibit user-defined properties. With our framework, the user specifies through a fitness function what type of circuit should be created, for instance circuits that prepare a specific target state while keeping depth at a minimum and maximizing fidelity. Our framework is designed in such a way that the user can easily integrate a custom designed fitness function. In this paper, we introduce our framework and run experiments to show the validity of the approach.
The design of quantum circuits is often still done manually, for instance by following certain patterns or rule of thumb. While this approach may work well for some problems, it can be a tedious task and present quite the challenge in other situations. Designing the architecture of a circuit for a simple classification problem may be relatively straightforward task, however, creating circuits for more complex problems or that are resilient to certain known problems (e.g. barren plateaus, trainability, etc.) is a different issue. Moreover, efficient state preparation or circuits with low depth are important for virtually most algorithms. In attempts to automate the process of designing circuits, different approaches have been suggested over the years, including genetic algorithms and reinforcement learning. We propose our GA4QCO framework that applies a genetic algorithm to automatically search for quantum circuits that exhibit user-defined properties. With our framework, the user specifies through a fitness function what type of circuit should be created, for instance circuits that prepare a specific target state while keeping depth at a minimum and maximizing fidelity. Our framework is designed in such a way that the user can easily integrate a custom designed fitness function. In this paper, we introduce our framework and run experiments to show the validity of the approach.
Designing effective quantum circuits remains a central challenge in quantum computing, as circuit structure strongly influences expressivity, trainability, and hardware feasibility. Current approaches, whether using manually designed circuit templates, fixed heuristics, or automated rules, face limitations in scalability, flexibility, and adaptability, often producing circuits that are poorly matched to the specific problem or quantum hardware. In this work, we propose the Evolutionary eXploration of Augmenting Quantum Circuits (EXAQC), an evolutionary approach to the automated design and training of parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) which leverages and extends on strategies from neuroevolution and genetic programming. The proposed method jointly searches over gate types, qubit connectivity, parameterization, and circuit depth while respecting hardware and noise constraints. The method supports both Qiskit and Pennylane libraries, allowing the user to configure every aspect. This work highlights evolutionary search as a critical tool for advancing quantum machine learning and variational quantum algorithms, providing a principled pathway toward scalable, problem-aware, and hardware-efficient quantum circuit design. Preliminary results demonstrate that circuits evolved on classification tasks are able to achieve over 90% accuracy on most of the benchmark datasets with a limited computational budget, and are able to emulate target circuit quantum states with high fidelity scores.
Abstract Most of the existing qubit mapping algorithms are deterministic, resulting in a lack of diversity in the generated quantum circuit mappings, which makes it difficult to strike a balance between quality and diversity, and prevents them from being flexibly adapted to different quantum computing tasks. To solve this problem, this paper proposes the Genetic Algorithm-based Quantum Circuit Mapping (GAQCM) framework, which is based on the idea of genetic algorithm, evaluates the quality of mapping by the fitness function, and continuously improves the mapping scheme through several iterations. The GAQCM framework is designed to be flexible, providing a variety of choices, crossover operations and several unique mutation methods are designed to improve the performance of the algorithm. The framework also introduces a neighbourhood gate-based initialisation strategy to improve the algorithm efficiency and convergence speed. Experimental results show that the GAQCM framework reduces the number of SWAP gates by an average of 44.6% and 62.0%, and reduces the hardware gate overhead by 13.8% and 14.9% in the t|ket > and Qiskit compilers, respectively, compared to 2QAN. The framework allows users to customise the fitness function and parameter settings according to their specific needs, and is suitable for a variety of quantum computing tasks.
Recent work on hybrid quantum-classical machine learning systems has demonstrated success in utilizing parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) to solve the challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, with provable learning advantages over classical systems, e.g., deep neural networks. While existing work demonstrates and exploits the strength of PQC-based models, the design choices of PQC architectures and the interactions between different quantum circuits on learning tasks are generally underexplored. In this work, we introduce a Multi-objective Evolutionary Architecture Search framework for parameterized quantum circuits (MEAS-PQC), which uses a multi-objective genetic algorithm with quantum-specific configurations to perform efficient searching of optimal PQC architectures. Experimental results show that our method can find architectures that have superior learning performance on three benchmark RL tasks, and are also optimized for additional objectives including reductions in quantum noise and model size. Further analysis of patterns and probability distributions of quantum operations helps identify performance-critical design choices of hybrid quantum-classical learning systems.
Automatic quantum circuit design is motivated by the difficulties in manual design, because quantum algorithms are highly non-intuitive and practical quantum computer hardware is not yet available. Thus, quantum computers have to be simulated on classical hardware which naturally entails an exponential growth of computational costs and allows only to simulate small quantum systems, i. e., with only few qubits. Huge search spaces render evolutionary approaches nearly unable to achieve breakthrough solutions in the development of new quantum algorithms. Consequently, at present we must be content to evolve essentially already existing (black-box) quantum algorithms. This thesis presents empirical results on the evolution of quantum circuits using genetic programming. For that purpose, a linear and a linear-tree GP system (allowing intermediate measurements) with integrated quantum computer simulator were implemented. Their practicality in evolving quantum circuits is shown in different experiments for 1-SAT (solutions act like Hogg's algorithm) and the Deutsch-Jozsa problem. These experiments confirm that the evolution of quantum circuits is practically feasible only for sufficiently small problem instances. In this context, scalability and the detection of scalability becomes very important. It is shown that scalable quantum circuits are evolvable to a certain degree: a general quantum circuit can be inferred manually from the evolved solutions for small instances of the given problem. Besides, further experiments indicate that 're-evolution' is effective for the evolution of scalable quantum circuits. With this method the start population of a problem instance is inoculated with evolved solutions for a smaller problem instance. Furthermore, investigations of fitness landscapes and selection strategies are made, with the aim of improving the efficiency of evolutionary search. A notable result is that using the crossover operator damages rather than benefits evolution of quantum circuits.
Post-Variational Quantum Neural Networks (PVQNNs) eliminate the need for quantum parameter optimization by employing fixed, non-parametric circuits and shifting all learning to the classical domain, thereby avoiding barren plateaus entirely. However, the performance of PV-QNNs critically depends on the choice of ansatz architecture. In this work, we propose an automatic ansatz optimization framework based on Genetic Algorithms (GAs) that searches for optimal circuit ensembles under discrete constraints of topology, depth, and gate types. Quantum features are extracted efficiently via classical shadows and processed by a shallow classical classifier, preserving the post-variational property. Experimental results on the Fashion-MNIST (0 vs 4) classification task demonstrate that GA-selected ensembles outperform all baselines, achieving 89.0 % accuracy with 8 qubits, exceeding random and manually designed templates by3−5%. Moreover, GA ensembles achieve up to1.9×higher accuracy per circuit and2×higher accuracy per twoqubit gate, while maintaining shallower circuits (6.0 depth vs. 8.6). These results indicate that evolutionary search effectively identifies compact, information-rich quantum circuits, enabling scalable and resource-efficient post-variational learning.
This paper explores the potential for algorithmic self-assembly to revolutionize quantum circuit design. Traditionally, quantum circuit design is a highly manual and often inefficient process, heavily reliant on expert intuition and trial-and-error. We propose a novel approach where a quantum circuit is treated as a self-assembling system, governed by an evolutionary algorithm. This algorithm iteratively refines circuit topology and gate parameters to meet pre-specified performance criteria – such as fidelity, circuit depth, and gate count. The core claim is that by mimicking the self-assembly behavior observed in biological systems, we can automate the creation of optimized quantum circuits. This work formalizes this process, outlining a genetic algorithm that drives the automated design. The system's ability to explore a vast design space and adapt to complex performance requirements represents a significant advancement in the field, potentially unlocking the full capabilities of quantum computation. This paper details the algorithm's architecture, the optimization criteria, and the underlying mathematical framework, showcasing a viable path towards automated quantum circuit construction.