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arXiv:2607.15316

Structure-Agnostic Unitary Learning from Quantum Observable Dynamics with Application to Hamiltonian Identification

Mohamed Berkani

quant-phSubmitted Jul 16, 2026• Announced Jul 17, 2026• 0 citations
v1 · Jul 16, 2026v2 · Jul 26, 2026
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Abstract

We present a variational algorithm for learning an unknown quantum unitary from time-series observable measurements, with no structural assumption about the target. The core separation: a hardware-efficient parametrised circuit learns the evolution operator U via observable matching; Hamiltonian identification follows as classical post-processing via matrix logarithm, when the target happens to be exp(-iH*tau). Three experiments establish the method's generality. First, a noiseless proof of correctness with exact gradients (L-BFGS-B) achieves MSE 1.61e-14 and recovers all Hamiltonian coefficients to six decimal places. Second, a gate-learning experiment fits CNOT, iSWAP, and a Haar-random SU(4) element -- none generated by any fixed Hamiltonian -- all to process fidelity 1.000000, confirming the method does not rely on Trotterisation structure. Third, quantum deployment via SPSA-Adam under Qiskit Aer depolarising noise (p1=0.001, p2=0.01, Nshots=1024) recovers all three Ising Hamiltonian terms with errors below 8%. The optimiser, SPSA-Adam, combines SPSA's hardware-efficient two-point gradient estimation with Adam's adaptive moment updates. A four-stage moment-warm curriculum progressively extends the training horizon, converting a global non-convex problem into a sequence of well-posed local ones.

Comments
7 pages, 15 tables, 1 algorithm.This preprint is based on and extends the author's Master's thesis completed at Université Ferhat Abbas Sétif 1 (2026)

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We present a variational algorithm for learning an unknown quantum unitary from time-series observable measurements, with no structural assumption about the target. The core separation: a hardware-efficient parametrised circuit learns the evolution operator U via observable matching; Hamiltonian identification follows as classical post-processing via matrix logarithm, when the target happens to be exp(-iH*tau).
Three experiments establish the method's generality. First, a noiseless proof of correctness with exact gradients (L-BFGS-B) achieves MSE 1.61e-14 and recovers all Hamiltonian coefficients to six decimal places. Second, a gate-learning experiment fits CNOT, iSWAP, and a Haar-random SU(4) element -- none generated by any fixed Hamiltonian -- all to process fidelity 1.000000, confirming the method does not rely on Trotterisation structure. Third, quantum deployment via SPSA-Adam under Qiskit Aer depolarising noise (p1=0.001, p2=0.01, Nshots=1024) recovers all three Ising Hamiltonian terms with errors below 8%.
The optimiser, SPSA-Adam, combines SPSA's hardware-efficient two-point gradient estimation with Adam's adaptive moment updates. A four-stage moment-warm curriculum progressively extends the training horizon, converting a global non-convex problem into a sequence of well-posed local ones.
We present a variational algorithm for learning an unknown quantum unitary from time-series observablemeasurements, with no structural assumption about the target. The core separation: a hardware-efficient parametrisedcircuit learns the evolution operator U via observable matching; Hamiltonian identification follows as classical post-processing via matrix logarithm, when the target happens to be e−iHτ .Three experiments establish the method’s generality. First, a noiseless proof of correctness with exact gradients(L-BFGS-B) achieves MSE 1.61×10−14 and recovers all Hamiltonian coefficients to six decimal places. Second, agate-learning experiment fits CNOT, iSWAP, and a Haar-random SU(4) element — none generated by any fixedHamiltonian — all to process fidelity 1.000000, confirming the method does not rely on Trotterisation structure.Third, quantum deployment via SPSA-Adam under Qiskit Aer depolarising noise (p1=0.001, p2= 0.01, Nshots= 1024)recovers all three Ising Hamiltonian terms with errors below 8%.The optimiser, SPSA-Adam, combines SPSA’s hardware-efficient two-point gradient estimation with Adam’sadaptive moment updates. A four-stage moment-warm curriculum progressively extends the training horizon, convertinga global non-convex problem into a sequence of well-posed local ones
Compiling time-evolution operators of the form U(t)=e−iHtU(t)=e^{-iHt}U(t)=e−iHt into hardware-native gate sequences is a central bottleneck for digital quantum simulation on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Generic transpilation treats U(t)U(t)U(t) as an arbitrary unitary, discarding the structure of Hamiltonian dynamics and producing circuits whose depth exceeds hardware coherence limits. We introduce a structure-aware compilation framework that treats product-formula decompositions as synthesis primitives rather than simulation approximations. The method combines (i) native placement of Hamiltonian terms onto the hardware coupling map, (ii) adaptive selection of Trotter blocks via a greedy discretization procedure, and (iii) variational refinement using a Trotter-initialized ansatz. Across Heisenberg, Ising, and XY models with n=3n=3n=3--888 qubits, the compiled circuits achieve fidelities F>0.996F>0.996F>0.996 with approximately linear scaling in the number of entangling gates, while generic synthesis produces circuits that are orders of magnitude deeper. On IBM Torino hardware, we observe a regime in which shorter approximate circuits outperform deeper exact decompositions: a 27-CX circuit achieves higher hardware fidelity (Fhw=0.987F_{\mathrm{hw}}=0.987Fhw​=0.987) than a 187-CX exact circuit. These results demonstrate that, in the NISQ regime, structure-aware approximate compilation can outperform exact structure-agnostic synthesis, providing a practical pathway for executing Hamiltonian dynamics without requiring pulse-level control.
The Hamiltonian of a quantum system governs the dynamics of the system via the Schrodinger equation. In this paper, the Hamiltonian is reconstructed in the Pauli basis using measurables on random states forming a time series data set. The time propagation is implemented through Trotterization and optimized variationally with gradients computed on the quantum circuit. We validate our output by reproducing the dynamics of unseen observables on a randomly chosen state not used for the optimization. Unlike existing techniques that try and exploit the structure/properties of the Hamiltonian, our scheme is general and provides freedom with regard to what observables or initial states can be used while still remaining efficient with regard to implementation. We extend our protocol to doing quantum state learning where we solve the reverse problem of doing state learning given time series data of observables generated against several Hamiltonian dynamics. We show results on Hamiltonians involving XX, ZZ couplings along with transverse field Ising Hamiltonians and propose an analytical method for the learning of Hamiltonians consisting of generators of the SU (3) group. This paper is likely to pave the way toward using Hamiltonian learning for time series prediction within the context of quantum machine learning algorithms.
Quantum operations on pure states can be fully represented by unitary matrices. Variational quantum circuits, also known as quantum neural networks, embed data and trainable parameters into gate-based operations and optimize the parameters via gradient descent. The high cost of training and low fidelity of current quantum devices, however, restricts much of quantum machine learning to classical simulation. For few-qubit problems with large datasets, training the matrix elements directly, as is done with weight matrices in classical neural networks, can be faster than decomposing data and parameters into gates. We propose a method that trains matrices directly while maintaining unitarity through a single regularization term added to the loss function. A second training step, circuit alignment, then recovers a gate-based architecture from the resulting soft-unitary. On a five-qubit supervised classification task with 1000 datapoints, this two-step process produces a trained variational circuit in under four minutes, compared to over two hours for direct circuit training, while achieving lower binary cross-entropy loss. In a second experiment, soft-unitaries are embedded in a hybrid quantum-classical network for a reinforcement learning cartpole task, where the hybrid agent outperforms a purely classical baseline of comparable size.
We design an algorithm for learning the coefficients of an nnn-qubit constant-local Lindbladian to ε\varepsilonε error with O(gd2log⁡(n)/ε2)O(g d^2 \log(n) / \varepsilon^2)O(gd2log(n)/ε2) total evolution time, where ggg is the single-site energy and ddd is the (approximate) degree of the interaction graph. Though Lindbladians present new challenges not present in the special case of Hamiltonians, our algorithm achieves the suite of desiderata attained by state-of-the-art Hamiltonian learning algorithms: (1) it uses non-adaptive, ancilla-free randomized Pauli measurement circuits with a time resolution of only Θ(1/g)Θ(1/g)Θ(1/g); (2) it works without knowledge of the structure of the unknown Lindbladian; (3) it depends on a smooth form of degree, thereby supporting the learning of quasi-local and power-law Lindbladians. Moreover, we prove a lower bound showing that our algorithm is optimal in each parameter up to logarithmic factors. Our algorithm is a simple iterative method, where the objective function consists of Fourier coefficients of the Lindbladian restricted to few-site regions. Its analysis identifies the difficulty unique to open systems, which we call "confusing" terms. For settings where the "confusion" is limited, the performance of the algorithm improves. We demonstrate this for the case of structure learning of Hamiltonians from access to real-time evolution, where we obtain a new algorithm that is significantly simpler than previous work. In addition, using the same iterative method, we design the first efficient algorithm for structure learning Hamiltonians from high-temperature Gibbs states.
Sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics (SINDy) is a data-driven framework for estimating classical nonlinear dynamical systems from time-series data. In this approach, system dynamics is represented as a linear combination of a predefined set of basis functions, and the corresponding coefficients are sparsely estimated from observed time-series data. In this study, we propose sparse identification of quantum Hamiltonian dynamics (SIQHDy), a SINDy-inspired quantum circuit learning framework for estimating quantum Hamiltonian dynamics from time-series data of quantum measurement outcomes. In SIQHDy, the unitary evolution of a quantum Hamiltonian system is expressed as a product of basis quantum circuits, and the corresponding circuit parameters are estimated through sparsity-promoting optimization. We numerically demonstrate that SIQHDy accurately reconstructs the dynamics of single-, three-, and five-spin systems, and exhibits robustness to measurement noise in the three-spin case. Furthermore, we propose an extension of SIQHDy for scenarios with limited accessible observables and evaluate its performance in identifying two-spin systems and in network-structure identification for five-spin systems.