Quantum technology has been rapidly growing; in particular, the experiments that have been performed with superconducting qubits and circuit QED have allowed us to explore the light-matter interaction at its most fundamental level. The study of coherent dynamics between two-level systems and resonator modes can provide insight into fundamental aspects of quantum physics, such as how the state of a system evolves while being continuously observed. To study such an evolving quantum system, experimenters need to verify the accuracy of state preparation and control since quantum systems are very fragile and sensitive to environmental disturbance. In this thesis, I look at these continuous monitoring and state estimation problems from a modern point of view. With the help of machine learning techniques, it has become possible to explore regimes that are not accessible with traditional methods: for example, tracking the state of a superconducting transmon qubit continuously with dynamics fast compared with the detector bandwidth. These results open up a new area of quantum state tracking, enabling us to potentially diagnose errors that occur during quantum gates. In addition, I investigate the use of supervised machine learning, in the form of a modified denoising autoencoder, to simultaneously remove experimental noise while encoding one and two-qubit quantum state estimates into a minimum number of nodes within the latent layer of a neural network. I automate the decoding of these latent representations into positive density matrices and compare them to similar estimates obtained via linear inversion and maximum likelihood estimation. Using a superconducting multiqubit chip, I experimentally verify that the neural network estimates the quantum state with greater fidelity than either traditional method. Furthermore, the network can be trained using only product states and still achieve high fidelity for entangled states. This simplification of the training overhead permits the network to aid experimental calibration, such as the diagnosis of multi-qubit crosstalk. As quantum processors increase in size and complexity, I expect automated methods such as those presented in this thesis to become increasingly attractive.
Quantum technology has been rapidly growing; in particular, the experiments that have been performed with superconducting qubits and circuit QED have allowed us to explore the light-matter interaction at its most fundamental level. The study of coherent dynamics between two-level systems and resonator modes can provide insight into fundamental aspects of quantum physics, such as how the state of a system evolves while being continuously observed. To study such an evolving quantum system, experimenters need to verify the accuracy of state preparation and control since quantum systems are very fragile and sensitive to environmental disturbance. In this thesis, I look at these continuous monitoring and state estimation problems from a modern point of view. With the help of machine learning techniques, it has become possible to explore regimes that are not accessible with traditional methods: for example, tracking the state of a superconducting transmon qubit continuously with dynamics fast compared with the detector bandwidth. These results open up a new area of quantum state tracking, enabling us to potentially diagnose errors that occur during quantum gates. In addition, I investigate the use of supervised machine learning, in the form of a modified denoising autoencoder, to simultaneously remove experimental noise while encoding one and two-qubit quantum state estimates into a minimum number of nodes within the latent layer of a neural network. I automate the decoding of these latent representations into positive density matrices and compare them to similar estimates obtained via linear inversion and maximum likelihood estimation. Using a superconducting multiqubit chip, I experimentally verify that the neural network estimates the quantum state with greater fidelity than either traditional method. Furthermore, the network can be trained using only product states and still achieve high fidelity for entangled states. This simplification of the training overhead permits the network to aid experimental calibration, such as the diagnosis of multi-qubit crosstalk. As quantum processors increase in size and complexity, I expect automated methods such as those presented in this thesis to become increasingly attractive.
Introduction: The scalability of superconducting quantum processors is fundamentally limited by environmental noise and the exponential measurement overhead required for multi-qubit entanglement verification. Methods: In this work, we introduce a hybrid machine learning (ML) framework utilizing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to simultaneously characterize decoherence channels and verify multipartite entanglement. The model is trained on synthetic noisy syndrome measurement data augmented with empirical SPAM models and applied to a 5-qubit superconducting device, where the neural network acts as a non-linear entanglement witness. Results: sweeps. Furthermore, it successfully verifies genuine multipartite entanglement with a fidelity prediction of 99.1%, while requiring only 12% of the measurement bases demanded by full quantum state tomography (QST). Discussion: Crucially, our methodology bypasses two distinct challenges: it drastically reduces the measurement complexity inherent in multi-qubit entanglement verification, and it inherently filters out state preparation and measurement (SPAM) errors without requiring noise-amplifying matrix inversions. These numerical results demonstrate that ML-assisted protocols provide a highly resource-efficient pathway for the characterization of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices.
Weak measurements of a superconducting qubit produce noisy voltage signals that are weakly correlated with the qubit state.To recover individual quantum trajectories from these noisy signals, traditional methods require slow qubit dynamics and substantial prior information in the form of calibration experiments.Monitoring rapid qubit dynamics, e.g., during quantum gates, requires more complicated methods with increased demand for prior information.Here, we experimentally demonstrate an alternative method for accurately tracking rapidly driven superconducting qubit trajectories that uses a long short-term memory (LSTM) artificial neural network with minimal prior information.Despite few training assumptions, the LSTM produces trajectories that include qubit-readout resonator correlations due to a finite detection bandwidth.In addition to revealing rotated measurement eigenstates and a reduced measurement rate in agreement with theory for a fixed drive, the trained LSTM also correctly reconstructs evolution for an unknown drive with rapid modulation.Our work enables new applications of weak measurements with faster or initially unknown qubit dynamics, such as the diagnosis of coherent errors in quantum gates.
Two-level systems (TLS) in superconducting quantum devices are a dominant source of decoherence, noise, and device variability, ultimately limiting qubit performance and scalability. Efficient and reliable extraction of TLS parameters from spectroscopy measurements is therefore essential for both device characterization and materials optimization. In this thesis, machine learning methods are developed to accelerate and enhance TLS characterization from superconducting qubit spectroscopy data. The approach combines physics-based simulation of driven qubit–TLS dynamics with supervised learning models trained on synthetic datasets to infer underlying physical parameters from two-dimensional spectroscopy maps. Particular emphasis is placed on understanding how different parameters are encoded in observable features, and on evaluating the extent to which the inverse problem is well-posed. The results demonstrate that machine-learning-assisted inference can significantly reduce the computational cost of parameter estimation compared to conventional fitting-based approaches, while maintaining high accuracy for spectrally encoded parameters such as TLS frequency and coupling strength. In contrast, decoherence parameters are shown to be intrinsically more challenging to extract from short-time spectroscopy data, highlighting fundamental limitations of the measurement protocol rather than the learning model. Overall, this work establishes a data-driven framework for scalable TLS characterization and provides insight into the interplay between physical observability and machine learning-based inference in quantum systems.
This thesis presents original contributions at the intersection of quantum computing and machine learning, investigating how these two fields can benefit from each other. The first part of the thesis presents two applications of machine learning techniques in quantum computing. The first contribution involves the use of artificial neural networks for the decoding of quantum error correction codes, resulting in faster decoding times while maintaining a high level of accuracy. The originality of this work lies in the application of explainable machine learning techniques to both improve the decoding performance and to provide insights into the decoding process. The second contribution introduces a novel technique based on reinforcement learning to characterize and simulate the noise affecting a quantum chip. This technique reduces the heuristic assumption on the noise model, making it more adaptable to the specific noise characteristics of the quantum device. In the second part of the thesis, we demonstrate, with two examples, how it is possible to implement machine learning algorithms on quantum devices by replacing artificial neural networks with parametrized quantum circuits. The first contribution in this section introduces a quantum anomaly detection algorithm, applied to the field of high-energy physics. This algorithm allows for the identification of anomalous patterns in quantum data, maintaining a level of accuracy comparable to classical algorithms. The novelty of this work lies in the first use of quantum circuits for the task of anomaly detection in a muon drift chamber trigger system, with possible future applications to quantum detector systems in high-energy physics experiments. The second contribution presents the quantum version of a generative diffusion model, able to sample quantum states from a well-defined distribution. This first implementation of a quantum diffusion model is not meant to outperform classical models, but rather to show potential advantages and limitations of these kinds of algorithms. The aim of the thesis is to show how quantum computing can benefit from machine learning, and how machine learning can be implemented on quantum devices, setting the stage for future advancements in both fields.
Quantum entanglement is a fundamental resource in quantum information, but its characterization becomes increasingly challenging as the size of multipartite systems grows. This thesis investigates machine learning methods to detect and quantify entanglement in pure multiqubit states using only single qubit Pauli expectation values. Two complementary tasks are considered: the distinction between fully separable and entangled states, with particular attention to weakly entangled states close to the separability boundary, and the regression of normalized multipartite classical squashed entanglement. Several machine learning models are evaluated for detection, while multilayer perceptrons are employed for quantification. The low entanglement regime is investigated through dedicated datasets and targeted data augmentation strategies. The proposed approaches are studied for systems of 5, 10, 15, and 20 qubits and are further evaluated under realistic measurement conditions, including finite shot noise, asymmetric readout errors, calibration drift, and data acquired from real quantum processors. The study assesses the scalability, robustness, and practical limitations of data-driven entanglement characterization based on a linearly scaling set of local observables.
Quantum processors require rapid and high-fidelity simultaneous measurements of many qubits. While superconducting qubits are among the leading modalities toward a useful quantum processor, their readout remains a bottleneck. Traditional approaches to processing measurement data often struggle to account for crosstalk present in frequency-multiplexed readout, the preferred method to reduce the resource overhead. Recent approaches to address this challenge use neural networks to improve the state-discrimination fidelity. However, they are computationally expensive to train and evaluate, resulting in increased latency and poor scalability as the number of qubits increases. We present an alternative machine learning approach based on next-generation reservoir computing that constructs polynomial features from the measurement signals and maps them to the corresponding qubit states. This method is highly parallelizable, avoids the costly nonlinear activation functions common in neural networks, and supports real-time training, enabling fast evaluation, adaptability, and scalability. Despite its lower computational complexity, our reservoir approach is able to maintain high qubit-state-discrimination fidelity. Relative to traditional methods, our approach achieves error reductions of up to 50% and 11% on single- and five-qubit datasets, respectively, and delivers up to 2.5x crosstalk reduction on the five-qubit dataset. Compared with recent machine-learning methods, evaluating our model requires 100x fewer multiplications for single-qubit and 2.5x fewer for five-qubit models. This work demonstrates that reservoir computing can enhance qubit-state discrimination while maintaining scalability for future quantum processors.