Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:2608.20738

Continuous-Time Quantum Walks based Graph Neural Network

Yuliang Zhan, Zefeng Gao, Jian Li, Yang Liu, Hao Sun

Published Aug 21, 2026• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used on graph-structured data, but most suffer from two key weaknesses. First, message passing behaves as a low-pass filter under the homophily assumption, leading to poor performance on heterophilic graphs. Second, stacking layers drives node features toward constants, causing over-smoothing. Existing methods usually address these issues separately, while the few joint solutions rely largely on empirical heuristics, and many over-smoothing remedies sacrifice model expressiveness. We propose \textbf{CTQW-GNN}, a GNN based on Continuous-Time Quantum Walks (CTQW), to address both issues with theoretical justification. Its design exploits two properties of the CTQW propagator $e^{-\mathrm{i}Ht}$. First, it is unitary and has eigenvalues on the unit circle, so no frequency component is damped, counteracting the low-pass bias. Second, unitarity preserves feature norms and prevents the Dirichlet energy from decaying exponentially with depth, thereby mitigating over-smoothing. CTQW-GNN combines three complementary aggregation modules. \textit{CTQW-based Aggregation} evolves node features through the unitary propagator, preserving mid- and high-frequency signals for heterophilic graphs while preventing Dirichlet-energy collapse. \textit{CTQW-Attention Aggregation} constructs a multi-hop neighbor graph from CTQW amplitudes and applies attention over it, enabling access to distant homophilic nodes missed by single-hop aggregation. \textit{LF Aggregation} uses a standard low-pass GAT branch to retain strong performance on homophilic graphs, where pure CTQW aggregation can be suboptimal. We further provide a spectral-gap analysis explaining energy preservation and a Lieb--Robinson-type bound that gives a principled rule for selecting the walk time $t$.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2608.20738

Related papers

CTQWformer: A CTQW-based Transformer for Graph Classification

Zhan Li, Wuqing Yu, Yusen Wu +1 more

Graph Neural Networks (GNN) and Transformer-based architectures have achieved remarkable progress in graph learning, yet they still struggle to capture both global structural dependencies and model the dynamic information propagation. In this paper, we propose CTQWformer, a hybrid graph learning framework that integrates continuous-time quantum walks (CTQW) with GNN. CTQWformer employs a trainable Hamiltonian that fuses graph topology and node features, enabling physically grounded modeling of quantum walk dynamics that captures rich and intricate graph structure information. The extracted CTQW-based representations are incorporated into two complementary modules:(i) a Graph Transformer module that embeds final-time propagation probabilities as structural biases in the self-attention mechanism, and (ii) a Graph Recurrent Module that captures temporal evolution patterns with bidirectional recurrent networks. Extensive experiments on benchmark graph classification datasets demonstrate that CTQWformer outperforms graph kernel and GNN-based methods, demonstrating the potential of integrating quantum dynamics into trainable deep learning frameworks for graph representation learning. To the best of our knowledge, CTQWformer is the first hybrid CTQW-based Transformer, integrating CTQW-derived structural bias with temporal evolution modeling to advance graph learning.

cs.LGCross-listedarXiv:2605.09486•May 12, 2026•0 citations

Scalable Message-Passing Quantum Graph Neural Networks in the Weisfeiler-Leman Hierarchy

Snehal Raj, Brian Coyle, Léo Monbroussou +3 more

Graphs provide a natural language for relational data in chemistry, biology and optimisation. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have driven much of the recent progress in learning from such data through message passing, a single primitive that generalises convolution and attention. Quantum counterparts have been proposed, but with limited connection to message passing and few guarantees on performance or scalability. More broadly, the trainability of variational quantum circuits is a recognised bottleneck for their wide applicability, and pre-training has emerged as one way to address it. Yet for a quantum model to be useful, it must offer expressivity guarantees along with demonstrable scalability. Here we show how a quantum graph neural network can be built to perform message passing, to be permutation equivariant, and to sit at a chosen level of the Weisfeiler-Leman hierarchy, the standard measure of how finely a model can tell graphs apart. We show that, as for classical GNNs, the training can be done first on small graph instances, allowing for a pre-training that can mitigate usual training issues, and its output can be read out at a cost that stays low as the graph grows. We validate the framework in large-scale simulations of up to 56 qubits across three datasets, on synthetic graphs that ordinary message passing cannot separate, on molecular property prediction, and on the travelling salesperson problem. Our framework opens a path for near-term quantum algorithms with theoretical guarantees and practical scalability, bringing the principles of graph learning into quantum circuit design.

quant-pharXiv:2606.26873•Jun 26, 2026•0 citations

Continuous Time Quantum Walk Propagation for Irregular Temporal Graph Forecasting

Jiaqi Sun, Tianhao Li, Zhihao Bian

Continuous time quantum walks built on graph Laplacians produce non monotonic graph propagation features through quantum interference during evolution, which classical diffusion cannot achieve. Such walks deliver a physically motivated propagation scheme for temporal graph signal modeling. We propose Quantum Walk Temporal Architecture (QWTA), which replaces classical graph propagation with a CTQW-type parameterized spectral propagator. QWTA embeds effective observation intervals into the spectral phase modulation of the propagation kernel. QWTA-Base preserves exact CTQW spectral evolution and serves as a physically faithful propagation reference. QWTA-GR further introduces phase soft clipping and gated residual fusion to stabilize propagation. The results show that explicit phase encoding of irregular time intervals, when combined with suitable stabilization, provides a physically motivated and competitive graph propagation design for temporal graph forecasting with missing historical observations.

quant-pharXiv:2607.17273•Jul 21, 2026•0 citations

Graph Neural Networks on Quantum Computers

Yidong Liao, Xiao‐Ming Zhang, Christopher Ferrie

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful machine learning models that excel at analyzing structured data represented as graphs, demonstrating remarkable performance in applications like social network analysis and recommendation systems. However, classical GNNs face scalability challenges when dealing with large-scale graphs. This paper proposes frameworks for implementing GNNs on quantum computers to potentially address the challenges. We devise quantum algorithms corresponding to the three fundamental types of classical GNNs: Graph Convolutional Networks, Graph Attention Networks, and Message-Passing GNNs. A complexity analysis of our quantum implementation of the Simplified Graph Convolutional (SGC) Network shows potential quantum advantages over its classical counterpart, with significant improvements in time and space complexities. Our complexities can have trade-offs between the two: when optimizing for minimal circuit depth, our quantum SGC achieves logarithmic time complexity in the input sizes (albeit at the cost of linear space complexity). When optimizing for minimal qubit usage, the quantum SGC exhibits space complexity logarithmic in the input sizes, offering an exponential reduction compared to classical SGCs, while still maintaining better time complexity. These results suggest our Quantum GNN frameworks could efficiently process large-scale graphs. This work paves the way for implementing more advanced Graph Neural Network models on quantum computers, opening new possibilities in quantum machine learning for analyzing graph-structured data.

arXiv:2405.17060•May 27, 2024•2 citations

Quantum-enhanced learning: Leveraging von Neumann entropy for enhanced graph neural network performance

Muhammad Awais, Octavian Adrian Postolache, Sancho Moura Oliveira

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have established themselves as powerful tools for learning from graph-structured data. However, their reliance on local message-passing mechanisms leads to over-squashing-the compression of exponentially growing neighborhood information into fixed-size vectors-which severely limits long-range dependency modeling. We introduce the Quantum-Inspired Graph Neural Network (QGNN) with a novel Quantum Entanglement Loss (QEL) function that addresses this challenge through a fundamentally different mechanism than existing approaches. Unlike spectral regularization (which enforces smoothness) or maximum entropy methods (which encourage representation diversity), QEL minimizes the von Neumann entropy of the node embedding correlation matrix, thereby concentrating eigenvalues in dominant eigenmodes that preserve global structural patterns. This entropy minimization creates direct information pathways between distant but functionally related nodes, effectively bypassing multi-hop bottlenecks. We evaluate QGNN on both standard benchmarks (Cora, Citeseer, PPI, Electronic Circuits) and the Long Range Graph Benchmark (LRGB) suite, which features graphs with average diameters up to 56.99 (Peptides). On LRGB datasets, QGNN achieves substantial improvements: 37.6% relative MAE reduction on Peptides-struct compared to GCN, 4.0% improvement over Graph Transformers (GraphGPS), and notably, 97% better performance than GCN on node pairs separated by 7+ hops. Despite these gains, QGNN requires only 20-30% additional computational overhead compared to standard GCN, while being 5-6 × faster than Graph Transformer approaches. Our results establish entropy-based regularization as a principled and efficient approach for long-range dependency modeling in graphs.

Neural Networks•Apr 9, 2026•0 citations

Scalable Quantum Message Passing Graph Neural Networks for Next-Generation Wireless Communications: Architectures, Use Cases, and Future Directions

Le Tung Giang, Nguyen Xuan Tung, Trinh Van Chien +2 more

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are eminently suitable for wireless resource management, thanks to their scalability, but they still face computational challenges in large-scale, dense networks in classical computers. The integration of quantum computing with GNNs offers a promising pathway for enhancing computational efficiency because they reduce the model complexity. This is achieved by leveraging the quantum advantages of parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs), while retaining the expressive power of GNNs. However, existing pure quantum message passing models remain constrained by the limited number of qubits, hence limiting the scalability of their application to the wireless systems. As a remedy, we conceive a Scalable Quantum Message Passing Graph Neural Network (SQM-GNN) relying on a quantum message passing architecture. To address the aforementioned scalability issue, we decompose the graph into subgraphs and apply a shared PQC to each local subgraph. Importantly, the model incorporates both node and edge features, facilitating the full representation of the underlying wireless graph structure. We demonstrate the efficiency of SQM GNN on a device-to-device (D2D) power control task, where it outperforms both classical GNNs and heuristic baselines. These results highlight SQM-GNN as a promising direction for future wireless network optimization.

arXiv:2601.18198•Jan 26, 2026•0 citations
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used on graph-structured data, but most suffer from two key weaknesses. First, message passing behaves as a low-pass filter under the homophily assumption, leading to poor performance on heterophilic graphs. Second, stacking layers drives node features toward constants, causing over-smoothing. Existing methods usually address these issues separately, while the few joint solutions rely largely on empirical heuristics, and many over-smoothing remedies sacrifice model expressiveness. We propose \textbf{CTQW-GNN}, a GNN based on Continuous-Time Quantum Walks (CTQW), to address both issues with theoretical justification. Its design exploits two properties of the CTQW propagator e−iHte^{-\mathrm{i}Ht}e−iHt. First, it is unitary and has eigenvalues on the unit circle, so no frequency component is damped, counteracting the low-pass bias. Second, unitarity preserves feature norms and prevents the Dirichlet energy from decaying exponentially with depth, thereby mitigating over-smoothing. CTQW-GNN combines three complementary aggregation modules. \textit{CTQW-based Aggregation} evolves node features through the unitary propagator, preserving mid- and high-frequency signals for heterophilic graphs while preventing Dirichlet-energy collapse. \textit{CTQW-Attention Aggregation} constructs a multi-hop neighbor graph from CTQW amplitudes and applies attention over it, enabling access to distant homophilic nodes missed by single-hop aggregation. \textit{LF Aggregation} uses a standard low-pass GAT branch to retain strong performance on homophilic graphs, where pure CTQW aggregation can be suboptimal. We further provide a spectral-gap analysis explaining energy preservation and a Lieb--Robinson-type bound that gives a principled rule for selecting the walk time ttt.
Graph Neural Networks (GNN) and Transformer-based architectures have achieved remarkable progress in graph learning, yet they still struggle to capture both global structural dependencies and model the dynamic information propagation. In this paper, we propose CTQWformer, a hybrid graph learning framework that integrates continuous-time quantum walks (CTQW) with GNN. CTQWformer employs a trainable Hamiltonian that fuses graph topology and node features, enabling physically grounded modeling of quantum walk dynamics that captures rich and intricate graph structure information. The extracted CTQW-based representations are incorporated into two complementary modules:(i) a Graph Transformer module that embeds final-time propagation probabilities as structural biases in the self-attention mechanism, and (ii) a Graph Recurrent Module that captures temporal evolution patterns with bidirectional recurrent networks. Extensive experiments on benchmark graph classification datasets demonstrate that CTQWformer outperforms graph kernel and GNN-based methods, demonstrating the potential of integrating quantum dynamics into trainable deep learning frameworks for graph representation learning. To the best of our knowledge, CTQWformer is the first hybrid CTQW-based Transformer, integrating CTQW-derived structural bias with temporal evolution modeling to advance graph learning.
Graphs provide a natural language for relational data in chemistry, biology and optimisation. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have driven much of the recent progress in learning from such data through message passing, a single primitive that generalises convolution and attention. Quantum counterparts have been proposed, but with limited connection to message passing and few guarantees on performance or scalability. More broadly, the trainability of variational quantum circuits is a recognised bottleneck for their wide applicability, and pre-training has emerged as one way to address it. Yet for a quantum model to be useful, it must offer expressivity guarantees along with demonstrable scalability. Here we show how a quantum graph neural network can be built to perform message passing, to be permutation equivariant, and to sit at a chosen level of the Weisfeiler-Leman hierarchy, the standard measure of how finely a model can tell graphs apart. We show that, as for classical GNNs, the training can be done first on small graph instances, allowing for a pre-training that can mitigate usual training issues, and its output can be read out at a cost that stays low as the graph grows. We validate the framework in large-scale simulations of up to 56 qubits across three datasets, on synthetic graphs that ordinary message passing cannot separate, on molecular property prediction, and on the travelling salesperson problem. Our framework opens a path for near-term quantum algorithms with theoretical guarantees and practical scalability, bringing the principles of graph learning into quantum circuit design.
Continuous time quantum walks built on graph Laplacians produce non monotonic graph propagation features through quantum interference during evolution, which classical diffusion cannot achieve. Such walks deliver a physically motivated propagation scheme for temporal graph signal modeling. We propose Quantum Walk Temporal Architecture (QWTA), which replaces classical graph propagation with a CTQW-type parameterized spectral propagator. QWTA embeds effective observation intervals into the spectral phase modulation of the propagation kernel. QWTA-Base preserves exact CTQW spectral evolution and serves as a physically faithful propagation reference. QWTA-GR further introduces phase soft clipping and gated residual fusion to stabilize propagation. The results show that explicit phase encoding of irregular time intervals, when combined with suitable stabilization, provides a physically motivated and competitive graph propagation design for temporal graph forecasting with missing historical observations.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful machine learning models that excel at analyzing structured data represented as graphs, demonstrating remarkable performance in applications like social network analysis and recommendation systems. However, classical GNNs face scalability challenges when dealing with large-scale graphs. This paper proposes frameworks for implementing GNNs on quantum computers to potentially address the challenges. We devise quantum algorithms corresponding to the three fundamental types of classical GNNs: Graph Convolutional Networks, Graph Attention Networks, and Message-Passing GNNs. A complexity analysis of our quantum implementation of the Simplified Graph Convolutional (SGC) Network shows potential quantum advantages over its classical counterpart, with significant improvements in time and space complexities. Our complexities can have trade-offs between the two: when optimizing for minimal circuit depth, our quantum SGC achieves logarithmic time complexity in the input sizes (albeit at the cost of linear space complexity). When optimizing for minimal qubit usage, the quantum SGC exhibits space complexity logarithmic in the input sizes, offering an exponential reduction compared to classical SGCs, while still maintaining better time complexity. These results suggest our Quantum GNN frameworks could efficiently process large-scale graphs. This work paves the way for implementing more advanced Graph Neural Network models on quantum computers, opening new possibilities in quantum machine learning for analyzing graph-structured data.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have established themselves as powerful tools for learning from graph-structured data. However, their reliance on local message-passing mechanisms leads to over-squashing-the compression of exponentially growing neighborhood information into fixed-size vectors-which severely limits long-range dependency modeling. We introduce the Quantum-Inspired Graph Neural Network (QGNN) with a novel Quantum Entanglement Loss (QEL) function that addresses this challenge through a fundamentally different mechanism than existing approaches. Unlike spectral regularization (which enforces smoothness) or maximum entropy methods (which encourage representation diversity), QEL minimizes the von Neumann entropy of the node embedding correlation matrix, thereby concentrating eigenvalues in dominant eigenmodes that preserve global structural patterns. This entropy minimization creates direct information pathways between distant but functionally related nodes, effectively bypassing multi-hop bottlenecks. We evaluate QGNN on both standard benchmarks (Cora, Citeseer, PPI, Electronic Circuits) and the Long Range Graph Benchmark (LRGB) suite, which features graphs with average diameters up to 56.99 (Peptides). On LRGB datasets, QGNN achieves substantial improvements: 37.6% relative MAE reduction on Peptides-struct compared to GCN, 4.0% improvement over Graph Transformers (GraphGPS), and notably, 97% better performance than GCN on node pairs separated by 7+ hops. Despite these gains, QGNN requires only 20-30% additional computational overhead compared to standard GCN, while being 5-6 × faster than Graph Transformer approaches. Our results establish entropy-based regularization as a principled and efficient approach for long-range dependency modeling in graphs.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are eminently suitable for wireless resource management, thanks to their scalability, but they still face computational challenges in large-scale, dense networks in classical computers. The integration of quantum computing with GNNs offers a promising pathway for enhancing computational efficiency because they reduce the model complexity. This is achieved by leveraging the quantum advantages of parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs), while retaining the expressive power of GNNs. However, existing pure quantum message passing models remain constrained by the limited number of qubits, hence limiting the scalability of their application to the wireless systems. As a remedy, we conceive a Scalable Quantum Message Passing Graph Neural Network (SQM-GNN) relying on a quantum message passing architecture. To address the aforementioned scalability issue, we decompose the graph into subgraphs and apply a shared PQC to each local subgraph. Importantly, the model incorporates both node and edge features, facilitating the full representation of the underlying wireless graph structure. We demonstrate the efficiency of SQM GNN on a device-to-device (D2D) power control task, where it outperforms both classical GNNs and heuristic baselines. These results highlight SQM-GNN as a promising direction for future wireless network optimization.