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IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology

Quantum-Inspired Reinforcement Learning for Quantum Control

Haixu Yu, Xudong Zhao, Chunlin Chen

Published Aug 14, 2024• 11 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1109/tcst.2024.3437142

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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.
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Applying deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to solve quantum control problems has become a popular research direction. However, the exploration capability and reward design for the learning agent, which usually affect the DRL’s application performance, has not been sufficiently emphasized. In this article, we propose a particle-assisted DRL (PDRL) method to address the above concern by enhancing exploration capabilities and designing appropriate reward functions for efficient quantum state manipulation. In PDRL, each episode in the quantum learning process is characterized by three kinds of events, i.e., unidentifiable, identifiable, and successful events. To improve exploration, exploration particles and feedback particles are employed in the early learning phase when episodes end in identifiable and successful events, respectively. To assign rewards, three event-based reward functions are provided for the DRL’s agent, exploration particles and feedback particles, respectively. Numerical results on single-qubit, two-qubit, and many-qubit systems validate the effectiveness of PDRL. Comparative results with existing DRL methods demonstrate the superior performance of PDRL for quantum state manipulation.