Distributed quantum computing provides a scalable route for executing quantum circuits beyond the capacity limits of a single quantum processing unit (QPU), but it introduces a communication-aware compilation problem involving strict hardware constraints and circuit dependencies. This paper presents an architecture-aware reinforcement-learning framework that formulates distributed quantum compilation as a constrained Markov Decision Process (MDP). The compiler-level communication actions dynamically update logical-qubit placement and enable subsequent gate execution. A heterogeneous graph model represents interactions among hardware, logical qubits, and circuit operations, while a policy trained via Proximal Policy Optimization optimizes EPR-pair consumption and communication makespan. Evaluation across benchmark circuits shows that our policy matches state-of-the-art heuristics on structured workloads, with lookahead reward shaping yielding modest improvements on unstructured circuits. These results demonstrate that reinforcement learning is a flexible alternative to manual heuristics, though scalability remains a key bottleneck for practical use.
Distributed quantum computing provides a scalable route for executing quantum circuits beyond the capacity limits of a single quantum processing unit (QPU), but it introduces a communication-aware compilation problem involving strict hardware constraints and circuit dependencies. This paper presents an architecture-aware reinforcement-learning framework that formulates distributed quantum compilation as a constrained Markov Decision Process (MDP). The compiler-level communication actions dynamically update logical-qubit placement and enable subsequent gate execution. A heterogeneous graph model represents interactions among hardware, logical qubits, and circuit operations, while a policy trained via Proximal Policy Optimization optimizes EPR-pair consumption and communication makespan. Evaluation across benchmark circuits shows that our policy matches state-of-the-art heuristics on structured workloads, with lookahead reward shaping yielding modest improvements on unstructured circuits. These results demonstrate that reinforcement learning is a flexible alternative to manual heuristics, though scalability remains a key bottleneck for practical use.
As it becomes increasingly difficult to monolithically scale a quantum processor, distributed quantum computing (DQC) offers an alternative by distributing qubits across multiple smaller interconnected quantum processor modules. In such an architecture, the challenge of quantum circuit compilation shifts from placing and routing qubits within one module to placing, routing and using the qubits efficiently across modules. In order to optimize circuit execution time, the right state-dependent networking decisions must be found, such as when and where to generate shared remote quantum states to support remote operations.
Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a natural framework for this problem, generating a compilation policy that can generalize across different circuits. Building on the framework of Promponas et al. (2024), we introduce an agent that combines a novel action-space formulation with effective action-masking strategies. A comprehensive numerical comparison of the two approaches under different coupling constraints shows that our agent achieves improved training and inference performance with a relative reduction in the modeled execution time of up to 35\%.
Quantum circuit optimization is a foundational challenge in realizing practical quantum computation, requiring the reduction of gate counts and circuit depth while preserving logical equivalence across noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Conventional rule-based and heuristic compilation approaches demonstrate diminishing effectiveness as circuit complexity grows, motivating the search for adaptive, data-driven alternatives. This paper reformulates quantum circuit optimization as a Markov decision process (MDP), enabling deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents to autonomously discover efficient transformation strategies. A graph neural network (GNN)-based actor-critic architecture is developed to encode circuit topology and guide transformation selection. Drawing on empirical evidence from phase-structured quantum control tasks, neural feedback architectures, and convergence behavior in active learning agents, we demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves an average two-qubit gate count reduction of 31.4% and a circuit depth reduction of 27.8% across standard benchmark circuits, outperforming established compilation baselines. This work provides a principled theoretical foundation for the RL-as-optimizer paradigm and contributes an extensible experimental platform suited to NISQ-era constraints.
This paper presents a novel approach to quantum circuit compilation leveraging reinforcement learning (RL). The core idea is to train an RL agent to dynamically optimize quantum circuit structures, aiming to minimize gate count and enhance overall circuit performance. Traditional quantum circuit compilation methods often rely on static heuristics and pre-defined optimization strategies, which may not be optimal for all quantum algorithms or hardware platforms. Our approach addresses this limitation by allowing the RL agent to learn a policy that adapts to the specific characteristics of the algorithm and the target quantum hardware. The agent learns by interacting with a simulated quantum circuit environment, receiving rewards based on circuit fidelity, depth, and gate count. The results demonstrate the potential of RL to significantly improve the efficiency and robustness of quantum computations. The key components of the system are: a high-level quantum algorithm representation, an RL agent, a quantum circuit simulator, and a reward function. The agent's policy is represented as a neural network, enabling it to generalize across different algorithms and hardware. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through simulations, showcasing its ability to outperform conventional compilation methods in terms of reducing circuit depth and gate count while maintaining high fidelity.
Scalable quantum computing requires execution models that go beyond the capacity of a single quantum processing unit (QPU). Although current hardware platforms continue to increase in qubit count, large fault-tolerant applications require substantially more physical qubits, stronger connectivity, and lower effective error rates than a monolithic near-term device can provide. Multi-QPU and multi-core architectures therefore form an important route towards larger quantum systems. However, distributing a quantum computation introduces compiler and architecture constraints that do not arise in conventional classical distribution. A partitioned quantum circuit separates gates and qubits that may still be logically entangled or mutually dependent. The system must therefore provide quantum resources that support entanglement between the distributed circuit fragments, while each local subcircuit must remain executable on the hardware topology of its assigned QPU. In this thesis, graph states serve as the explicit interconnection resources for these nonlocal dependences: they encode the entanglement structure required to support teleportation-based operations across QPUs. This thesis studies scalable quantum execution as an architecture-driven compilation problem. It develops a staged framework in which distribution, graph-state-based interconnection, and interconnection robustness are treated as dependent compiler decisions. The framework addresses three connected questions: 1) how a large quantum circuit should be divided when the resulting subcircuits must match real QPU topologies; 2) how the graph states required to entangle and operate across the distributed circuit boundaries can be prepared efficiently on constrained hardware; and 3) how those graph-state resources can remain useful under the loss and fusion failures that arise during preparation and use. These questions define an execution path from a large logical circuit to distributed local workloads connected by explicit entanglement resources. The thesis makes three main technical contributions that instantiate this framework. 1) It introduces hardware-aware circuit cutting, which incorporates the relationship between subcircuit interaction graphs and target QPU topology into the partitioning objective. This stage produces distributed workloads and explicit cut boundaries where quantum entanglement must be supplied across QPUs. 2) It formulates graph-state preparation as the resource-generation stage for those boundaries and develops methods that reduce preparation depth and emitter usage by exploiting graph-state equivalence and divide-and-conquer construction. 3) It develops a robust graph-state interconnection scheme that uses tree-encoded fusion and spin-memory-assisted compilation to tolerate photon loss and probabilistic fusion failures, so that the graph state can serve as a reliable connection between distributed quantum program fragments.
Quantum circuit compilation is a critical step in realizing quantum algorithms on near-term quantum hardware. The process of translating high-level quantum algorithms into low-level gate sequences, while minimizing gate count and circuit depth, is often performed using deterministic algorithms that struggle to adapt to the diverse and often imperfect characteristics of available quantum devices. This paper proposes a novel approach to quantum circuit compilation utilizing reinforcement learning (RL). An RL agent is trained to dynamically adapt to hardware constraints, such as qubit connectivity and gate decomposition costs, optimizing circuit fidelity and execution time. The core claim is that RL can significantly improve quantum circuit compilation by introducing a dynamic and adaptive compilation process. The agent learns a policy that maps high-level quantum algorithms to optimized low-level gate sequences, effectively bridging the gap between theoretical algorithms and practical hardware execution. This work demonstrates the potential of RL to overcome the limitations of traditional deterministic compilation methods and paves the way for more efficient and robust quantum algorithm implementation.
The scaling of quantum processors is currently limited by technical challenges such as decoherence and cross-talk. As the number of qubits grows, interference increases the computational noise. Distributed quantum computing addresses these limitations by interconnecting smaller, easier-to-handle quantum processors (cores), but it introduces the challenge of minimizing slow, error-prone inter-core communication. The task of distributing quantum circuits across cores while minimizing communication costs is known as the Qubit Allocation problem. This work focuses on developing a deep learning approach to this problem, emphasizing flexibility to quantum hardware topology and improving state-of-the-art performance. Heuristic and non-learning algorithms, such as the Hungarian Qubit Allocation (HQA), currently represent the state of the art. Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches leverage learned allocation policies but often lack flexibility, requiring retraining when hardware configurations change, and they fall short of the solution quality achieved by non-learning methods. However, learning mechanisms could outperform human-crafted heuristics. To overcome these limitations, this work proposes a flexible, transformer-based architecture that can handle arbitrary numbers of qubits and cores without retraining. Results show that the trained policy consistently outperforms the previous RL state of the art and narrows the gap between RL and HQA for the most common circuits. It achieves a 33% reduction in allocation cost relative to the HQA for the Cuccaro Adder and 25% on average for random circuits. These findings show that learning-based approaches can effectively match the performance of hand-crafted heuristics, a crucial step towards their application in real-world scenarios.