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arXiv:2608.05766

QSCI-CMP: Quantum-Selected Configuration Interaction with Chemically Motivated Preselection

Masahiko Kamoshita, Kosuke Mitarai

quant-phSubmitted Aug 6, 2026• Announced Aug 7, 2026• 0 citations
v1 · Aug 6, 2026v2 · Oct 19, 2026
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Abstract

We present QSCI-CMP, a quantum-classical hybrid algorithm for molecular ground-state calculations that reduces both the query count and the gate count of sample-based quantum diagonalization with amplitude amplification (SQD-AA). SQD-AA mitigates the measurement bottleneck of quantum-selected configuration interaction (QSCI) by amplifying the basis states that have not yet been measured. Its oracle, however, specifies the measured states by listing them one by one, so its gate count grows with the number of collected states. Moreover, the quantum resources are spent even on states whose importance is evident from chemical knowledge, such as low-order excitations from the Hartree-Fock reference, which could be collected classically at the outset. We therefore propose to fix such chemically trivial states in advance, include them in the diagonalization subspace from the start, and exclude them from the amplification target, using a low-cost oracle that recognizes them through the excitation level and the seniority number of each basis state. We numerically demonstrate that QSCI-CMP reduces the query count and the gate count required to reach chemical accuracy by up to approximately 68% and 72% relative to SQD-AA for 24-qubit systems. The chemically trivial subspace is freely tunable within the classical computational budget. A larger subspace shifts more work onto the classical solver and increases the reduction in quantum cost, and when it captures the ground state sufficiently well, no quantum sampling is needed at all. We also point out that a query-optimal iteration count known from the analysis of quantum search further reduces the query count of both methods by approximately 12%.

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We present QSCI-CMP, a quantum-classical hybrid algorithm for molecular ground-state calculations that reduces both the query count and the gate count of sample-based quantum diagonalization with amplitude amplification (SQD-AA). SQD-AA mitigates the measurement bottleneck of quantum-selected configuration interaction (QSCI) by amplifying the basis states that have not yet been measured. Its oracle, however, specifies the measured states by listing them one by one, so its gate count grows with the number of collected states. Moreover, the quantum resources are spent even on states whose importance is evident from chemical knowledge, such as low-order excitations from the Hartree-Fock reference, which could be collected classically at the outset. We therefore propose to fix such chemically trivial states in advance, include them in the diagonalization subspace from the start, and exclude them from the amplification target, using a low-cost oracle that recognizes them through the excitation level and the seniority number of each basis state. We numerically demonstrate that QSCI-CMP reduces the query count and the gate count required to reach chemical accuracy by up to approximately 68% and 72% relative to SQD-AA for 24-qubit systems. The chemically trivial subspace is freely tunable within the classical computational budget. A larger subspace shifts more work onto the classical solver and increases the reduction in quantum cost, and when it captures the ground state sufficiently well, no quantum sampling is needed at all. We also point out that a query-optimal iteration count known from the analysis of quantum search further reduces the query count of both methods by approximately 12%.
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We present a quantum-classical hybrid algorithm for calculating the ground state and its energy of the quantum many-body Hamiltonian by proposing an adaptive construction of a quantum state for the quantum-selected configuration interaction (QSCI) method. QSCI allows us to select important electronic configurations in the system to perform configuration interaction (CI) calculation (subspace diagonalization of the Hamiltonian) by sampling measurement for a proper input quantum state on a quantum computer, but how we prepare a desirable input state remains a challenge. We propose an adaptive construction of the input state for QSCI in which we run QSCI repeatedly to grow the input state iteratively. We numerically illustrate that our method, dubbed ADAPT-QSCI, can yield accurate ground-state energies for small molecules, including a noisy situation for eight qubits where error rates of two-qubit gates and the measurement are both as large as 1%. ADAPT-QSCI serves as a promising method to take advantage of current noisy quantum devices and pushes forward its application to quantum chemistry.
We propose quantum-selected configuration interaction, a class of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms for calculating the ground- and excited-state energies of many-electron Hamiltonians on noisy quantum devices. Suppose that an approximate ground state can be prepared on a quantum computer either by variational quantum eigensolver or by some other method. Then, by sampling the state in the computational basis, which is hard for classical computation in general, one can identify the electron configurations that are important for reproducing the ground state. The Hamiltonian in the subspace spanned by those important configurations is diagonalized on classical computers to output the ground-state energy and the corresponding eigenvector. The excited-state energies can be obtained similarly. The result is robust against statistical and physical errors because the noisy quantum devices are used only to define the subspace, and the resulting ground-state energy strictly satisfies the variational principle even in the presence of such errors. The expectation values of various other operators can also be estimated for obtained eigenstates with no additional quantum cost, since the explicit eigenvectors in the subspaces are known. We verified our proposal by numerical simulations and demonstrated it on a quantum device for an eight-qubit molecular Hamiltonian. The proposed algorithms are potentially feasible to tackle some challenging molecules by exploiting quantum devices with several tens of qubits, assisted by high-performance classical computing resources for diagonalization.
Sample-based Quantum Diagonalization (SQD), an extension of Quantum Selected Configuration Interaction (QSCI), has emerged as a promising hybrid quantum-classical paradigm for computing molecular ground state energies. By leveraging quantum sampling instead of variational optimization, QSCI avoids barren plateaus and enables direct reconstruction of correlated electronic wavefunctions. However, existing configuration recovery techniques primarily enforce symmetry constraints without guaranteeing optimal selection of the most physically relevant configurations, often leading to unnecessarily large subspaces and increased classical diagonalization costs. In this work, we introduce a machine-learned compact subspace generation protocol based on Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs), termed QSCI-RBM, and integrate it within the Density Matrix Embedding Theory (DMET) framework. The RBM is trained on quantum-sampled configurations to learn the underlying probability distribution of dominant determinants, enabling the targeted generation of high-probability configurations. We apply this framework to the simulation of a protein-ligand complex involving the inhibitor Carmofur bound to the SARS-CoV-2 main protease (MproM^{\text{pro}}Mpro). Our results demonstrate that DMET-QSCI-RBM achieves energies within the chemical accuracy threshold by accessing only approximately 4% of the configuration subspace. In contrast, standard DMET-SQD simulations failed to reach chemical accuracy while accessing up to 20% of the subspace, even as the chemical potential itself nearly converged. These findings highlight that RBM-assisted configuration generation produces significantly more compact subspaces while preserving physical accuracy, thereby reducing classical computational overhead and enabling the scalable quantum embedding simulation of complex biological systems.
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.