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arXiv:2610.26843

Quantum algorithms for optimal control: large-scale finite-horizon linear-quadratic regulation

Xiajie Huang, Cristina Álvarez Yuste, Nikita Guseynov, Nana Liu, Javier González-Conde

quant-phmath.OCSubmitted Oct 19, 2026• Announced Oct 20, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

We develop quantum algorithms for optimal control over a prescribed finite time interval (finite horizon), focusing on continuous-time linear-quadratic regulation (LQR). This foundational control problem often requires solving a nonlinear matrix Riccati equation, which can be costly for large systems and long control durations on conventional classical solvers. We instead work directly with the state-costate optimality equations, reformulating the LQR problem as a multiple-shooting linear system. Importantly, we prove a condition-number bound for the system that is independent of the horizon, under stabilizability and detectability assumptions. By incorporating the initial and final conditions into a single linear system, we can solve the subsequent linear system more efficiently with a quantum linear systems subroutine. For a given initial state, our quantum algorithms return classical estimates of the optimal cost and the optimal control inputs at a selected time, without constructing a Riccati solution operator. Given sparse-matrix block-encodings, an initial-state preparation oracle and a fixed number of control inputs, the query and gate complexities scale polylogarithmically with system size and control duration, provided that sparsity, relevant norms, and stability parameters are bounded. The dependence on the target error is inverse-linear up to logarithmic factors. We establish the required bounds uniformly in system size and duration for a family of damped mass-spring chains with two endpoint controls. Numerical experiments support the analysis.

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We develop quantum algorithms for optimal control over a prescribed finite time interval (finite horizon), focusing on continuous-time linear-quadratic regulation (LQR). This foundational control problem often requires solving a nonlinear matrix Riccati equation, which can be costly for large systems and long control durations on conventional classical solvers. We instead work directly with the state-costate optimality equations, reformulating the LQR problem as a multiple-shooting linear system. Importantly, we prove a condition-number bound for the system that is independent of the horizon, under stabilizability and detectability assumptions. By incorporating the initial and final conditions into a single linear system, we can solve the subsequent linear system more efficiently with a quantum linear systems subroutine. For a given initial state, our quantum algorithms return classical estimates of the optimal cost and the optimal control inputs at a selected time, without constructing a Riccati solution operator. Given sparse-matrix block-encodings, an initial-state preparation oracle and a fixed number of control inputs, the query and gate complexities scale polylogarithmically with system size and control duration, provided that sparsity, relevant norms, and stability parameters are bounded. The dependence on the target error is inverse-linear up to logarithmic factors. We establish the required bounds uniformly in system size and duration for a family of damped mass-spring chains with two endpoint controls. Numerical experiments support the analysis.
We present a quantum algorithm for solving the finite-horizon discrete-time Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control problem, which integrates optimal control and state estimation in the presence of stochastic disturbances and noise. Classical approaches to LQG require solving a backward Riccati recursion and a forward Kalman filter, both requiring computationally expensive matrix operations with overall time complexityO(Tn3)\mathscr{O}\left(T n^{3}\right)O(Tn3), wherennnis the system dimension andTTTis the time horizon. While efficient classical solvers exist, especially for small to medium-sized systems, their computational complexity grows rapidly with system dimension. To address this, we reformulate the full LQG pipeline using quantum linear algebra primitives, including block-encoded matrix representations and quantum singular value transformation (QSVT) techniques for matrix inversion and multiplication. We formally analyze the time complexity of each algorithmic component. Under standard assumptions on matrix condition numbers and encoding precision, the total runtime of the quantum LQG algorithm scales polylogarithmically with the system dimensionnnnand linearly with the time horizonTTT, offering an asymptotic quantum speedup over classical methods.
We develop quantum algorithms that construct block-encodings of solution matrices for continuous- and discrete-time algebraic Riccati equations (CAREs and DAREs), differential Riccati equations (DREs), and finite Riccati recursions. The Quantum Weighted Riesz Method, unifying four kinds of Riccati problems, constructs projectors onto the solution graphs using weighted Riesz branching operators and recovers the solution matrices. Under the stated access and normalization assumptions, our algorithms for CAREs and DAREs have near-optimal query complexity Θ(Rα)Θ(\mathcal Rα)Θ(Rα) up to logarithmic factors, with the generalized singularity factor R\mathcal RR that reflects spectral separation, and the output normalization ααα. For DREs and finite-horizon problems, the query complexity has an additional initialization conditioning factor κinitκ_{\rm init}κinit​. We establish product query lower bounds for specified input-oracle families, demonstrating necessary joint dependence on spectral separation and initialization or output scale. We also prove that selected-value promise problems are BQP-complete on explicit circuit-generated families of single-control discrete-time algebraic and zero-terminal differential Riccati equations. Applications include classical feedback evaluation for linear-quadratic control, a query-complexity comparison for stable random-phase approximation Riccati equations in quantum chemistry, and heated boundary control with numerical validation.
Quantum linear systems algorithms (QLSAs) aim to solve linear systems $A\bb{x}=\bb{b}$ exponentially faster than classical methods under certain conditions. In this work, we develop quantum algorithms for solving linear algebraic equations from an ODE-based perspective. Inspired by the linear combination of Hamiltonian simulation (LCHS) representation in the Fourier approach \cite{Childs2017QLSA}, we express the solution $\bb{x}$ as a linear combination of solutions to a system of linear convection equations, which become Schrödinger-type equations with unitary evolutions in the Fourier domain. We refer to this representation as LC-Schrödingerization. Based on this result, we construct an LCHS-based quantum algorithm with two LCHS instances: one for time-marching and one for numerical integration. The key construction uses the derivative of a Gaussian-smoothed hat function and recovers the solution over a fixed auxiliary interval. This permits a truncation time independent of the target accuracy and avoids the loss in success probability from selecting a single grid point. Periodization and explicit Fourier coefficients provide the corresponding projection error bounds. Under the stated oracle assumptions and given a constant-factor estimate of the solution norm, direct simulation of the select operators and block preconditioning achieve the optimal matrix-query complexity O(κAlog⁡1ε)\mathcal{O}(κ_A\log\frac1\varepsilon)O(κA​logε1​) without using variable-time amplitude amplification (VTAA). The same upper bound holds for queries to the right-hand-side preparation oracle.
Simulation of realistic classical mechanical systems is of great importance to many areas of engineering such as robotics, dynamics of rotating machinery and control theory. In this work, we develop quantum algorithms to estimate quantities of interest such as the kinetic energy in a given classical mechanical system in the presence of friction or damping as well as forcing or source terms, which makes the algorithm of practical interest. We show that for such systems, the quantum algorithm scales polynomially with the logarithm of the dimension of the system. We cast this problem in terms of Hamilton's equations of motion (equivalent to the first variation of the Lagrangian) and solve them using quantum algorithms for differential equations. We then consider the hardness of estimating the kinetic energy of a damped coupled oscillator system. We show that estimating the kinetic energy at a given time of this system to within additive precision is BQP hard when the strength of the damping term is bounded by an inverse polynomial in the number of qubits. We then consider the problem of designing optimal control of classical systems, which can be cast as the second variation of the Lagrangian. In this direction, we first consider the Riccati equation, which is a nonlinear differential equation ubiquitous in control theory. We give an efficient quantum algorithm to solve the Riccati differential equation well into the nonlinear regime. To our knowledge, this is the first example of any nonlinear differential equation that can be solved when the strength of the nonlinearity is asymptotically greater than the amount of dissipation. We then show how to use this algorithm to solve the linear quadratic regulator problem, which is an example of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation.
We propose a quantum-assisted framework for solving constrained finite-horizon nonlinear optimal control problems using a barrier Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) approach. A quantum subroutine is incorporated to efficiently solve the Schur complement step using block-encoding and Quantum Singular Value Transformation techniques. We formally analyze the time complexity and convergence behavior under the cumulative effect of quantum errors, establishing local input-to-state stability and convergence to a neighborhood of the stationary point, with explicit error bounds in terms of the barrier parameter and quantum solver accuracy. The proposed framework enables computational complexity to scale polylogarithmically with the system dimension demonstrating the potential of quantum algorithms to enhance classical optimization routines in nonlinear control applications.
Discrete nonlinear dynamical systems arise in population models, iterative optimization, and numerical simulations, where computing many iterations can be costly in high dimensions. We study Carleman embedding for forced quadratic discrete systems and its application to quantum state preparation. Under explicit stability and initial-state assumptions, we prove that the truncation error decreases geometrically with the embedding degree, uniformly over all iterations. A central obstacle in discrete time is that the lifted update can become dense even when the original coefficient maps are sparse. We overcome this obstacle by constructing an exact auxiliary linear-system representation that applies the coefficient maps one tensor factor at a time, with row and column sparsities bounded independently of the truncation degree. After rescaling, the associated history system has a condition number that grows linearly with the iteration count, uniformly in the truncation degree. These results yield a quantum algorithm for preparing an approximation to the normalized nnnth iterate with constant success probability. Under coherent input-access assumptions, and for fixed sparsity, stability parameters, and a known positive lower bound on the final-state norm, the oracle query complexity is linear in nnn and polylogarithmic in the inverse accuracy. Numerical experiments in one and three dimensions illustrate the convergence of the truncated embedding.