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International Conference on Transparent Optical Networks

Quantum Virtual Link Generation via Reinforcement Learning

Ramón Aparicio-Pardo, Antoine Cousson, Redha A. Alliche

Published Jul 2, 2023• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum networks make use of the quantum entanglement as building block. When two qubits are entangled, their state changes exhibit non-classical correlations used to design new applications not possible with classical communication, such us quantum key distribution or distributed quantum computation. Unfortunately, quantum entanglement is a probabilistic process strongly dependent on the features of involved devices (optical fibers, lasers, quantum memories, …). The management decisions (i.e., the control policy) to set up and keep the entanglement as long as possible with the highest quality constitutes a stochastic control problem. This process can be modelled as Markov Decision Process (MDP) and solved via the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework (a form of Machine Learning). In this work, we apply this RL framework to learn an entanglement management policy outperforming the State-of-the-Art policy when models characterising precisely the involved quantum devices are not known.

DOI
10.1109/icton59386.2023.10207249

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Optimized control of quantum networks is essential for enabling distributed quantum applications with strict performance requirements. In near-term architectures with constrained hardware, effective control may determine the feasibility of deploying such applications. Because quantum network dynamics are suitable for being modeled as a Markov decision process, dynamic programming and reinforcement learning (RL) offer promising tools for optimizing control strategies. However, key quantum network performance measures -- such as secret key rate in quantum key distribution -- often involve a non-linear relationship between interdependent variables that describe quantum state quality and generation rate. Such objectives are not easily captured by standard RL approaches based on additive rewards. We propose a novel gradient-based RL framework that directly optimizes non-linear, differentiable objective functions, while accounting for uncertainties introduced by classical communication delays. We evaluate this framework in the context of entanglement distillation between two quantum network nodes equipped with multiplexing capability, and demonstrate up to 20-23% improvement over heuristic baselines in certain parameter regimes. Our work comprises the first step towards non-linear objective function optimization in quantum networks with RL, opening a path towards more advanced use cases.
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Quantum entanglement brings high-speed and inherently privacy-preserving transmission for information communication in quantum networks. The qubit scarcity is an important issue that cannot be ignored in quantum networks due to the limited storage capacity of quantum devices, the short lifespan of qubits, and so on. In this article, we first formulate the qubit competition problem as the Cooperative-Qubit-Allocation-Problem (CQAP) by taking into account both the waiting time and the fidelity of end-to-end entanglement with the given transmission link set. We then model the CQAP as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and adopt a Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm to self-adaptively and cooperatively allocate qubits among quantum repeaters. Further, we introduce an Active Learning (AL) algorithm to improve the efficiency of the RL algorithm by reducing its trial-error times. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms the benchmark algorithms, with 23.5 ms reduction on the average waiting time and 19.2 improvement on the average path maturity degree, respectively.
Future quantum networks will make use of entanglement to perform numerous tasks, such as sending quantum information over long distances, distributed quantum computing, and quantum sensing. In general, these tasks will need to be performed simultaneously in various regions of a network, while minimizing resources and latency. We will thus require policies for scheduling link-level entanglement resources, and using the link-level entanglement to create various forms of multipartite entanglement required for every task. In this work, we address this problem using reinforcement learning. We formulate a Markov Decision Process for the problem and use double deep Q-networks (DQN) with Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs), experience replay buffers, and curriculum training to obtain policies. The key physical parameter is the probability of link-level entanglement generation, i.e., the link activation probability. We show that our policies maintain 100% success for up to 71% lower link activation probability than the baseline heuristics for a set of physically relevant network topologies. We then examine an additional constraint where experiment (task) placements are restricted to specific hardware types and demonstrate a similar advantage in performance over heuristics, with our policy maintaining at least an 80% success rate for up to a 59% lower link activation probability. Finally, we explore methods to interpret the learned policy by defining metrics enabling conclusions to be drawn about the model's behavior and by tasking a large language model (LLM) to derive a novel heuristic given example actions taken by the DQN-trained policy. We find that the LLM heuristic performs similarly to the DQN-trained policy in performance, indicating a promising method for interpretable policy extraction for large quantum networks, where direct training becomes computationally expensive.