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Youth Academic Annual Conference of Chinese Association of Automation (YAC)

Control design of two-level quantum systems with reinforcement learning

Haixu Yu, Xudong Xu, Hailan Ma, Zhangqing Zhu, Chunlin Chen

Published May 1, 2018• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In recent years, some experimental studies and simulations show that reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective learning control approach for solving certain quantum control problems. In this paper, Q-learning with different exploration strategies (e.g., ε-greedy and Softmax), probabilistic Q-learning (PQL) and quantum reinforcement learning (QRL) are applied to solve the state transition problem of two-level quantum systems (e.g., spin-1/2 systems), respectively. These reinforcement learning algorithms are introduced and analyzed regarding the learning control problem of the spin-1/2 system. According to the constraints of the control fields, two typical kinds of controllers, i.e., three-switch controller and Bang-Bang controller, are designed using reinforcement learning. The learning performance of the above RL algorithms for both of the three-switch control and Bang-Bang control of two-level quantum systems are demonstrated and analyzed.

DOI
10.1109/yac.2018.8406503

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In recent years, some experimental studies and simulations show that reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective learning control approach for solving certain quantum control problems. In this paper, Q-learning with different exploration strategies (e.g., ε-greedy and Softmax), probabilistic Q-learning (PQL) and quantum reinforcement learning (QRL) are applied to solve the state transition problem of two-level quantum systems (e.g., spin-1/2 systems), respectively. These reinforcement learning algorithms are introduced and analyzed regarding the learning control problem of the spin-1/2 system. According to the constraints of the control fields, two typical kinds of controllers, i.e., three-switch controller and Bang-Bang controller, are designed using reinforcement learning. The learning performance of the above RL algorithms for both of the three-switch control and Bang-Bang control of two-level quantum systems are demonstrated and analyzed.
Reinforcement learning (RL) is considered a powerful technology with the potential to revolutionize quantum control. However, the application effectiveness of traditional RL is often limited by some insurmountable experimental conditions. Thus, developing new RL algorithms that can efficiently manipulate the quantum system dynamics is a crucial task. Prior research has shown that incorporating quantum mechanical properties into RL can improve learning performance. In this article, we consider the quantum control problem where only the target state can be accurately identified and introduce a quantum-inspired RL (QiRL) method. In particular, we propose a quantum-inspired exploration strategy to replace a commonly used$\epsilon $-greedy strategy, as well as a quantum-inspired reward scheme to incentivize the learning agent. Numerical results on three quantum system control problems, i.e., one-qubit closed quantum system, two-level open quantum system, and many-qubit closed quantum system, verify the effectiveness of QiRL. Comparison results show that the proposed QiRL outperforms existing RL algorithms (deep Q-network and proximal policy optimization) in terms of stability and efficiency for solving quantum control problems.
The fast preparation of a quantum state with high fidelity is a key problem for a quantum system. We propose two modified algorithms based on the cutting-edge reinforcement learning methods for the flip from an initial state to a target one in a quantum spin system. The balance between exploration and exploitation and the size of a state space are key factors for reinforcement learning methods. In the first algorithm, we propose a modified ϵ\epsilonϵ-greedy strategy instead of the ε-greedy strategy to balance exploration and exploitation. Furthermore, we use the fidelity of the final state as the reward and leverage piecewise-constant driving protocols in every duration. The results show that the rate of correction of this algorithm is greater than that of Q-learning with ε-greedy strategy. However, it will still cost much time resource if the rotation angle from a state to the next state is too small. Thus, we initialize the state-action value table to reduce the state space in the second modified Q-learning algorithm (MQL), which can be found that the efficiency of learning is greatly improved.
The use of reinforcement learning (RL) in the design of quantum control strategies for pulse level control of NISQ era quantum devices is attracting growing interest. Model-free RL, not requiring preexisting knowledge of the physical system, acts as a black-box optimization tool well suited for noisy devices. In this work, we provide a simulation-based analysis of the performance of model-free RL for state preparation and qubit gate design in a challenging setup: indirect control of NV nuclear spins in a spin-bath. In particular, the spin-bath is modeled via the generalized cluster correlation expansion accounting for magnetic impurities and intra-bath interactions. We analyze the performance of the RL agents by performing simulations with minimally observable environments and noisy, sparse rewards as introduced in (Phys. Rev. X 12, 011059), and compare them to other state-of-the-art black-box optimization tools.
The balance between exploration and exploitation is a key problem for reinforcement learning methods, especially for Q-learning. In this paper, a fidelity-based probabilistic Q-learning (FPQL) approach is presented to naturally solve this problem and applied for learning control of quantum systems. In this approach, fidelity is adopted to help direct the learning process and the probability of each action to be selected at a certain state is updated iteratively along with the learning process, which leads to a natural exploration strategy instead of a pointed one with configured parameters. A probabilistic Q-learning (PQL) algorithm is first presented to demonstrate the basic idea of probabilistic action selection. Then the FPQL algorithm is presented for learning control of quantum systems. Two examples (a spin-1/2 system and a Λ-type atomic system) are demonstrated to test the performance of the FPQL algorithm. The results show that FPQL algorithms attain a better balance between exploration and exploitation, and can also avoid local optimal policies and accelerate the learning process.
Abstract The design of quantum system control is a key task to a powerful quantum information technology. In practical, traditional quantum system control methods often face different constraints, and are easy to cause both leakage and stochastic control errors under the condition of limited resources. Reinforcement learning has been proved as an efficient way to complete the quantum system control task. So a quantum system control method based on enhanced reinforcement learning (QSC-ERL) is proposed. A satisfactory control strategy is obtained through enhanced reinforcement learning so that the quantum system can be evolved accurately from the initial state to the target state. According to the number of candidate unitary operations, the three-switch control is used for simulation experiments. Compared with other methods, the QSC-ERL can achieve high fidelity learning control of quantum systems and improve the efficiency of quantum system control.
The progress in machine learning during the last decade has had a considerable impact on many areas of science and technology, including quantum technology. This work explores the application of reinforcement learning (RL) methods to the quantum control problem of state transfer in a single qubit. The goal is to create an RL agent that learns an optimal policy and thus discovers optimal pulses to control the qubit. The most crucial step is to mathematically formulate the problem of interest as a Markov decision process (MDP). This enables the use of RL algorithms to solve the quantum control problem. Deep learning and the use of deep neural networks provide the freedom to employ continuous action and state spaces, offering the expressivity and generalization of the process. This flexibility helps to formulate the quantum state transfer problem as an MDP in several different ways. All the developed methodologies are applied to the fundamental problem of population inversion in a qubit. In most cases, the derived optimal pulses achieve fidelity equal to or higher than 0.9999, as required by quantum computing applications. The present methods can be easily extended to quantum systems with more energy levels and may be used for the efficient control of collections of qubits and to counteract the effect of noise, which are important topics for quantum sensing applications.