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arXiv:2506.15466 · Physical Review A

Adaptive random compiler for Hamiltonian simulation

Yun-Zhuo Fan, Yu-Xia Wu, Dan-Bo Zhang

Published Nov 20, 2025• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Randomized compilation protocols have recently attracted attention as alternatives to traditional deterministic Trotter-Suzuki methods, potentially reducing circuit depth and resource overhead. These protocols determine gate-application probabilities based on the strengths of Hamiltonian terms, as measured by the Schatten-$\ensuremath{\infty}$ norm. However, relying solely on the Schatten-$\ensuremath{\infty}$ norm to define sampling distributions may not be optimal, especially for continuous-variable and hybrid-variable systems involving unbounded operators, where quantifying Hamiltonian strengths is challenging. In this work, we propose an adaptive randomized compilation algorithm that dynamically updates sampling weights via low-order moment measurements of Hamiltonian terms, assigning higher probabilities to terms with greater uncertainty. This approach improves accuracy without significantly increasing gate counts and extends randomized compilation to continuous-variable and hybrid-variable systems by addressing the difficulties in characterizing the strengths of unbounded Hamiltonian terms. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

DOI
10.1103/4nmq-twj8

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Randomized compilation protocols have recently attracted attention as alternatives to traditional deterministic Trotter-Suzuki methods, potentially reducing circuit depth and resource overhead. These protocols determine gate-application probabilities based on the strengths of Hamiltonian terms, as measured by the Schatten-\ensuremath∞\ensuremath{\infty}\ensuremath∞ norm. However, relying solely on the Schatten-\ensuremath∞\ensuremath{\infty}\ensuremath∞ norm to define sampling distributions may not be optimal, especially for continuous-variable and hybrid-variable systems involving unbounded operators, where quantifying Hamiltonian strengths is challenging. In this work, we propose an adaptive randomized compilation algorithm that dynamically updates sampling weights via low-order moment measurements of Hamiltonian terms, assigning higher probabilities to terms with greater uncertainty. This approach improves accuracy without significantly increasing gate counts and extends randomized compilation to continuous-variable and hybrid-variable systems by addressing the difficulties in characterizing the strengths of unbounded Hamiltonian terms. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Stochastic methods offer an effective way to suppress coherent errors in quantum simulation. In particular, the randomized compilation protocol may reduce circuit depth by randomly sampling Hamiltonian terms rather than following the deterministic Trotter-Suzuki sequence. However, its fixed sampling distribution does not adapt to the dynamics of the system, limiting its accuracy. In this work, we propose a fluctuation-guided adaptive algorithm that adaptively updates sampling probabilities based on fluctuations of Hamiltonian terms to achieve higher simulation fidelity. Remarkably, the protocol renders an intuitive physical understanding: Hamiltonian terms with greater sensitivity to the state evolution should be prioritized during sampling. The overload of measuring fluctuations necessary for updating the sampling probability is affordable, and can be further largely reduced by classical shadows. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method with numeral simulations across discrete-variable, continuous-variable and hybrid-variable systems.
The dynamics of a quantum system can be simulated using a quantum computer by breaking down the unitary into a quantum circuit of one and two qubit gates. The most established methods are the Trotter-Suzuki decompositions, for which rigorous bounds on the circuit size depend on the number of terms L in the system Hamiltonian and the size of the largest term in the Hamiltonian Λ. Consequently, the Trotter-Suzuki method is only practical for sparse Hamiltonians. Trotter-Suzuki is a deterministic compiler but it was recently shown that randomized compiling offers lower overheads. Here we present and analyze a randomized compiler for Hamiltonian simulation where gate probabilities are proportional to the strength of a corresponding term in the Hamiltonian. This approach requires a circuit size independent of L and Λ, but instead depending on λ the absolute sum of Hamiltonian strengths (the ℓ_{1} norm). Therefore, it is especially suited to electronic structure Hamiltonians relevant to quantum chemistry. Considering propane, carbon dioxide, and ethane, we observe speed-ups compared to standard Trotter-Suzuki of between 306× and 1591× for physically significant simulation times at precision 10^{-3}. Performing phase estimation at chemical accuracy, we report that the savings are similar.
Simulation of quantum chemistry is expected to be a principal application of quantum computing. In quantum simulation, a complicated Hamiltonian describing the dynamics of a quantum system is decomposed into its constituent terms, where the effect of each term during time-evolution is individually computed. For many physical systems, the Hamiltonian has a large number of terms, constraining the scalability of established simulation methods. To address this limitation we introduce a new scheme that approximates the actual Hamiltonian with a sparser Hamiltonian containing fewer terms. By stochastically sparsifying weaker Hamiltonian terms, we benefit from a quadratic suppression of errors relative to deterministic approaches. Relying on optimality conditions from convex optimisation theory, we derive an appropriate probability distribution for the weaker Hamiltonian terms, and compare its error bounds with other probability ansatzes for some electronic structure Hamiltonians. Tuning the sparsity of our approximate Hamiltonians allows our scheme to interpolate between two recent random compilers: qDRIFT and randomized first order Trotter. Our scheme is thus an algorithm that combines the strengths of randomised Trotterisation with the efficiency of qDRIFT, and for intermediate gate budgets, outperforms both of these prior methods.
Hamiltonian simulation is a central application of quantum computing. Randomized Hamiltonian simulation approximates the target dynamics by sampling quantum circuits and often allows simpler circuit implementations. We develop a framework for randomized Hamiltonian simulation in which Hamiltonian terms are sampled with arbitrary probabilities and the corresponding short-time evolutions are implemented sequentially. The leading channel error relative to ideal time evolution is governed by the variance of the sampled generators. Minimizing the variance-based upper bound on the worst-case error recovers qDRIFT, a leading randomized Hamiltonian simulation algorithm that samples terms in proportion to their operator norms. For typical input states, however, this sampling distribution need not be optimal. Minimizing Haar-averaged error bounds instead yields sampling probabilities proportional to the Hilbert-Schmidt norms of the terms. This choice can provide smaller average-error bounds than conventional qDRIFT. For Hamiltonians expressed as sums of Pauli strings, we combine this framework with commuting Pauli grouping to obtain smaller error bounds than conventional qDRIFT at fixed RzR_zRz​ depth. Numerical benchmarks for the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model show error-bound improvement factors consistent with linear scaling in the number of qubits. For the 108-qubit FeMoco Hamiltonian, the error bounds are reduced by a factor of about 5.65. These results establish average-error optimization as a practical design principle for randomized Hamiltonian simulation.
Simulation of quantum chemistry is expected to be a principal application of quantum computing. In quantum simulation, a complicated Hamiltonian describing the dynamics of a quantum system is decomposed into its constituent terms, where the effect of each term during time-evolution is individually computed. For many physical systems, the Hamiltonian has a large number of terms, constraining the scalability of established simulation methods. To address this limitation we introduce a new scheme that approximates the actual Hamiltonian with a sparser Hamiltonian containing fewer terms. By stochastically sparsifying weaker Hamiltonian terms, we benefit from a quadratic suppression of errors relative to deterministic approaches. Relying on optimality conditions from convex optimisation theory, we derive an appropriate probability distribution for the weaker Hamiltonian terms, and compare its error bounds with other probability ansatzes for some electronic structure Hamiltonians. Tuning the sparsity of our approximate Hamiltonians allows our scheme to interpolate between two recent random compilers: qDRIFT and randomized first order Trotter. Our scheme is thus an algorithm that combines the strengths of randomised Trotterisation with the efficiency of qDRIFT, and for intermediate gate budgets, outperforms both of these prior methods.
Randomized product formulas such as qDrift offer a resource-efficient alternative to deterministic Trotter--Suzuki decompositions for Hamiltonian simulation, removing their polynomial dependence on the number of Hamiltonian terms. qDrift, however, is intrinsically limited to first order in the evolution time, so its query complexity remains linear in the inverse of the target accuracy, 1/ε1/ε1/ε. We introduce Pathwise Random Hamiltonian Simulation (PRHS), which extends qDrift to arbitrary order by subdividing each time step into MMM correlated slices, each evolving under a term sampled from a quasi-probability distribution that we construct in closed form and prove unique, with a bias decaying factorially in MMM. Optimizing jointly over the number of slices MMM and the number of independent blocks NNN interpolates between the standard qDrift protocol at long times and a high-precision regime where the query cost grows slower than any power of 1/ε1/ε1/ε, without requiring ancillary qubits. Numerical simulations of five molecular Hamiltonians confirm this advantage, with PRHS achieving accuracies two to four orders of magnitude beyond qDrift at equal query cost.