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arXiv:2604.09756

Generative Circuit Design for Quantum-Selected Configuration Interaction

Ryota Kemmoku, Qi Gao, Shu Kanno, Kimberlee Keithley, Ikko Hamamura, Naoki Yamamoto, Kouhei Nakaji

quant-phSubmitted Apr 10, 2026• Announced Apr 13, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Quantum-selected configuration interaction (QSCI) has emerged as a feasible approach for approximating electronic ground states on noisy quantum devices toward large-system demonstrations. In QSCI, Slater determinants are sampled from a quantum-prepared state, and the Hamiltonian is then diagonalized in the sampled subspace. To create a high-quality subspace under hardware constraints, the design of the state-preparation circuit is crucial. Here, we present a Generative Quantum Eigensolver (GQE)-based framework that optimizes ansatz structures using a Transformer policy trained on the QSCI subspace energy. We validate the framework on N2 in active spaces of up to 32 qubits. We found that the optimized circuits reach chemical precision with substantially lower gate counts than time-evolved circuits. Quantitatively, this corresponds to an average reduction of 98% in the required two-qubit gate count relative to the single-step first-order Trotterized approximation and 83% relative to the qDRIFT approximation. Furthermore, the resulting wavefunctions are competitive with heat-bath configuration interaction (HCI) in terms of compactness. In stretched-bond, strongly correlated regimes, they achieve chemical precision with subspaces that are 50% smaller than those required by HCI.

Comments
17 pages, 9 figures

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Quantum-selected configuration interaction (QSCI) has emerged as a feasible approach for approximating electronic ground states on noisy quantum devices toward large-system demonstrations. In QSCI, Slater determinants are sampled from a quantum-prepared state, and the Hamiltonian is then diagonalized in the sampled subspace. To create a high-quality subspace under hardware constraints, the design of the state-preparation circuit is crucial. Here, we present a Generative Quantum Eigensolver (GQE)-based framework that optimizes ansatz structures using a Transformer policy trained on the QSCI subspace energy. We validate the framework on N2 in active spaces of up to 32 qubits. We found that the optimized circuits reach chemical precision with substantially lower gate counts than time-evolved circuits. Quantitatively, this corresponds to an average reduction of 98% in the required two-qubit gate count relative to the single-step first-order Trotterized approximation and 83% relative to the qDRIFT approximation. Furthermore, the resulting wavefunctions are competitive with heat-bath configuration interaction (HCI) in terms of compactness. In stretched-bond, strongly correlated regimes, they achieve chemical precision with subspaces that are 50% smaller than those required by HCI.
Quantum-selected configuration interaction (QSCI) is an approach for quantum chemical calculations using current quantum computers. In conventional QSCI, Slater determinants used for the wave function expansion are sampled by iteratively performing approximate wave function preparation and subsequent measurement in the computational basis, and then the subspace Hamiltonian matrix is diagonalized on a classical computer. In this approach, preparation of a high-quality approximate wave function is necessary to accurately compute total energies. Here we propose a Hamiltonian simulation-based QSCI (HSB-QSCI) to avoid this difficulty, by sampling the Slater determinants from quantum states generated by the real-time evolution of approximate wave functions. We provide numerical simulations for the lowest spin-singlet and triplet states of oligoacenes (benzene, naphthalene, and anthracene), phenylene-1,4-dinitrene, and hexa-1,2,3,4,5-pentaene. We found that the HSB-QSCI is applicable not only to molecules where the Hartree-Fock provides a good approximation of the ground state, but also to strongly correlated systems where preparing a high-quality approximate wave function is hard. Hardware demonstrations of the HSB-QSCI are also reported for carbyne molecules expressed by up to 36 qubits, using an IBM quantum processor. The HSB-QSCI captures more than 99.18% of the correlation energies in the active space by considering about 1% of all the Slater determinants in 36 qubit systems, illustrating the ability of the proposed method to efficiently consider important electronic configurations.
Quantum-selected configuration interaction (QSCI) utilizes an input quantum state on a quantum device to select important bases (electron configurations in quantum chemistry) that define a subspace in which to diagonalize a target Hamiltonian, i.e., perform selected configuration interaction, on classical computers. Previous proposals for preparing a good input state, which is crucial for the quality of QSCI, based on optimization of quantum circuits may suffer from optimization difficulty and require many runs of the quantum device. Here, we propose using a time-evolved state by the target Hamiltonian (for some initial state) as an input of QSCI. Our proposal is based on the intuition that the time evolution by the Hamiltonian creates electron excitations of various orders when applied to the initial state. We numerically investigate the accuracy of the energy obtained by the proposed method for quantum chemistry Hamiltonians describing electronic states of small molecules. Numerical results reveal that our method can yield sufficiently accurate ground-state energies for the investigated molecules. Systematic analysis when increasing the number of qubits in a hydrogen chain shows that the subspace size required for sufficiently accurate results is reasonable at system sizes that cannot be solved by naive classical diagonalization. Our proposal provides a systematic and optimization-free method to prepare the input state of QSCI and could contribute to practical applications of quantum computers in quantum chemistry calculations.
Predicting many molecular properties requires accurate ground-state energies of molecular Hamiltonians. Quantum-selected configuration interaction (QSCI) obtains such energies by measuring an input state to select important electronic configurations and classically diagonalizing the Hamiltonian in the subspace they span. ADAPT-QSCI, an adaptive extension of QSCI, improves the input state through iterative circuit growth. For single-reference molecules, the sampling distribution is dominated by the Hartree-Fock (HF) configuration, so most measurements reproduce a configuration already known. We reduce this redundancy by placing the HF configuration in the diagonalization subspace classically, before any measurement. This invalidates the operator-selection criterion of ADAPT-QSCI, and we derive a consistent replacement with energy and gradient in closed form, adding no query to the quantum device. At the per-iteration shot budgets previously used for ADAPT-QSCI, the proposed scheme reaches chemical accuracy with approximately 63%63\%63% and 43%43\%43% of the CNOT gates for H4\mathrm{H}_4H4​ and H6\mathrm{H}_6H6​, and 44%44\%44% and 40%40\%40% of the total shots. The advantage depends on the budget, however: in the infinite-shot limit the H4\mathrm{H}_4H4​ CNOT count increases to 125%125\%125% of that of ADAPT-QSCI. These results identify the per-iteration shot budget as a key design variable governing resource savings in QSCI-based algorithms.
Quantum algorithms for selecting a subspace of Hamiltonians to diagonalize have emerged as a promising alternative to variational algorithms in the NISQ era. So far, such algorithms, which include the quantum selected configuration interaction (QSCI) and sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD), have been formulated within second-quantization in Fock space, which leads to inefficient usage of qubit resources. We introduce the first QSCI algorithm developed in the CI-matrix (CIM) framework, which is known to have optimal qubit scaling of exactly ⌈log⁡2(N)⌉\lceil \log_2 (N) \rceil⌈log2​(N)⌉ where NNN is the size of the CIM. In addition, we introduce a novel single-bit flip error mitigation which comes at the overhead of a single qubit and we combine this with a stochastic approximate Trotterization evolution adapted from qDRIFT. Simulating benchmark N2_22​ and naphthalene molecules on quantum hardware, our results achieved similar accuracy as SQD methods but with significantly less quantum resources. However, our CIM-QSCI algorithm and SQD methods could not match the performance of classical heat-bath CI (HCI) for the same task. Hence, we introduce an augmented version of QSCI called quantum selected heat-bath CI (QSHCI). This variant replaces classical heat-bath sampling with quantum sampling from QSCI to achieve performance comparable to HCI. We note that a current drawback of our approach is the preprocessing cost of O(N2log⁡N)\mathcal{O}(N^2\log N)O(N2logN) for constructing the CIM and performing the Pauli decomposition. This can be further improved by considering efficient CIM access models for the stochastic Trotter evolution.
The pursuit of exact solutions to the many-body electronic Schrödinger equation is constrained by the exponential scaling of the Hilbert space. While Quantum-Selected Configuration Interaction (QSCI) provides a robust, hybrid quantum-classical alternative to standard Variational Quantum Eigensolvers, it is hampered by significant sampling inefficiencies and finite-shot bottlenecks in strongly correlated regimes. This report analyzes the integration of generative machine-learning models—including autoregressive transformers, Neural-Network Quantum States (NQS), and discrete diffusion models—as a transformative approach to the QSCI paradigm. By treating classical diagonalization outputs as high-quality training data, these generative architectures internalize complex electron correlation patterns, enabling active configuration discovery, dramatic wavefunction compression, and optimized quantum circuit design. This synthesis provides a scalable blueprint for achieving chemical accuracy in KSCCN Mamun, SM (2026) ………………………………..1 Integration of Generative Machine-Learning Models with Quantum-Selected Configuration Interaction: An Academic Extension K S C electronic structure simulations while maintaining the strict variational upper-bound guarantee of classical diagonalization. KSCCN Mamun, SM (2026) ………………………………..2 Integration of Generative Machine-Learning Models with Quantum-Selected Configuration Interaction: An Academic Extension Also available on Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/attachments/133495242/download_file?s=portfolio
Although quantum computing offers a promising solution for strongly correlated system simulation, existing algorithms face significant bottlenecks on current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Here, we introduce QiankunNet-QSCI, a hybrid quantum-classical framework that addresses this challenge by combining efficient quantum-sampling with a transformer neural network. An efficient unitary selected configuration Interaction (USCI) ansatz especially designed for quantum sampling is proposed to identify the most chemically significant electronic configurations on the Zuchongzhi 3.1 quantum processor. Subsequently, the transformer model QiankunNet learns from these sparse yet critical quantum data to infer and reconstruct the complete electronic wavefunction with high fidelity. Simulation of the challenging 40-qubit [2Fe-2S] ferredoxin active center achieves chemical accuracy. Simulation of the nitrogenase P-cluster in a 114-electron 73-orbital active space also reaches 12 milli-Hartree-level agreement with the best density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) result. QiankunNet-QSCI thus offers a practical route to accurate quantum-assisted electronic structure calculations on current devices.