Advanced quantum computers have the capability to perform practical quantum computing to address specific problems that are intractable for classical computers. Nevertheless, these computers are susceptible to noise, leading to unexpectable errors in outcomes, which makes them less trustworthy. To address this challenge, we propose HammingVis, a visual analytics approach that helps identify and understand errors in quantum outcomes. Given that these errors exhibit latent structural patterns within Hamming space, we introduce two graph visualizations to reveal these patterns from distinct perspectives. One highlights the overall structure of errors, while the other focuses on the impact of errors within important subspaces. We further develop a prototype system for interactively exploring and discerning the correct outcomes within Hamming space. A novel design is presented to distinguish the neighborhood patterns between error and correct outcomes. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through case studies involving two classic quantum algorithms’ outcome data.
Advanced quantum computers have the capability to perform practical quantum computing to address specific problems that are intractable for classical computers. Nevertheless, these computers are susceptible to noise, leading to unexpectable errors in outcomes, which makes them less trustworthy. To address this challenge, we propose HammingVis, a visual analytics approach that helps identify and understand errors in quantum outcomes. Given that these errors exhibit latent structural patterns within Hamming space, we introduce two graph visualizations to reveal these patterns from distinct perspectives. One highlights the overall structure of errors, while the other focuses on the impact of errors within important subspaces. We further develop a prototype system for interactively exploring and discerning the correct outcomes within Hamming space. A novel design is presented to distinguish the neighborhood patterns between error and correct outcomes. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through case studies involving two classic quantum algorithms’ outcome data.
We present the preliminary design and results of QVis, a visual analytics tool for exploring quantum device performance data. QV is helps uncover temporal and multivariate variations in noise properties of quantum devices. We describe the implementations of these methods as well as applications to the analysis of a 127-qubit data set derived from the IBM washington processor over a 16-month period. Both human-interactive and semi-automated analytic methods are included to address requirements for visual exploration, thresholding, and clustering techniques. Our application of QVis to real-world scenarios demonstrates the ability to reveal noteworthy patterns in the behavior of the critical characterization metrics.
Fathoming out quantum state space is a challenging endeavor due to its exponentially growing dimensionality. At the expense of being bound in its expressiveness, the discrete and finite subspace of graph states is easier to investigate via a pictorial framework accompanied with a theoretical toolkit from the stabilizer formalism. Analyzing hand-drawn graphs is a tedious and time-consuming task and imposes limitations to the problem sizes that can be addressed. Similarly, algorithmic studies using adjacency matrices alone lack the benefit of a visual representation of the states. We argue that applying visual analytics to investigate graph states can be advantageous. To this end, we introduce GRAPHSTATEVIS, a web-based application for the visual analysis of qubit graph states and their stabilizer groups. Our tool facilitates the interactive construction of a graph through multiple components supported by linking and brushing. The user can explore graph-state-specific properties, including the Pauli-weight distribution of its stabilizer operators and noise thresholds for entanglement criteria. We propose a use case in the context of near-term quantum algorithms to illustrate the capabilities of our prototype. We provide access to GRAPHSTATEVIS as an open-source project and invite the broader quantum computing and engineering communities to take advantage of this tool and further boost its development.
Quantum computing technology holds substantial promise as a reliable computational paradigm. However, current noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) systems, are significantly impacted by noise originating from hardware inconsistencies. This noise causes errors and lowers output fidelity. So we must find which basis states cause errors. However, there are two main challenges in analyzing noise corresponding to basis states. First, the noise distribution data is high dimensional in nature, thereby making its analysis challenging. Second, although functional box plots have been used in the state of the art research to understand such a high dimensional data, they suffer from clutter and occlusion issues because of overplotting. In this study, we introduce an innovative visualization pipeline to address the aforementioned challenges to provide a clear depiction of noisy and less-noisy basis states. Specifically, our proposed visualization pipeline comprises three stages namely, low dimensional embedding, clustering, and violin plot visualization, to reduce visual clutter and effectively analyze high-dimensional noise distribution data. Our analysis uses quantum machine learning (QML) circuits as case study for drawing a distinction between noisy and less noisy basis states.
Quantum computing is an emerging field that utilizes the unique principles of quantum mechanics to offer significant advantages in algorithm execution over classical approaches. This potential is particularly promising in the domain of quantum image processing, which aims to manipulate all pixels simultaneously. However, the process of designing and verifying these algorithms remains a complex and error-prone task. To address this challenge, new methods are needed to support effective debugging of quantum circuits. The Quantum Image Visualizer is an interactive visual analysis tool that allows for the examination of quantum images and their transformation throughout quantum circuits. The framework incorporates two overview visualizations that trace image evolution across a sequence of gates based on the most probable outcomes. Interactive exploration allows users to focus on relevant gates, and select pixels of interest. Upon selection, detailed visualizations enable in-depth inspection of individual pixels and their probability distributions, revealing how specific gates influence the likelihood of pixel color values and the magnitude of these changes. An evaluation of the Quantum Image Visualizer was conducted through in-depth interviews with eight domain experts. The findings demonstrate the effectiveness and practical value of our approach in supporting visual debugging of quantum image processing circuits.
The focus of this Visualization Viewpoints article is to provide some background on quantum computing (QC), to explore ideas related to how visualization helps in understanding QC, and examine how QC might be useful for visualization with the growth and maturation of both technologies in the future. In a quickly evolving technology landscape, QC is emerging as a promising pathway to overcome the growth limits in classical computing. In some cases, QC platforms offer the potential to vastly outperform the familiar classical computer by solving problems more quickly or that may be intractable on any known classical platform. As further performance gains for classical computing platforms are limited by diminishing Moore's Law scaling, QC platforms might be viewed as a potential successor to the current field of exascale-class platforms. While present-day QC hardware platforms are still limited in scale, the field of quantum computing is robust and rapidly advancing in terms of hardware capabilities, software environments for developing quantum algorithms, and educational programs for training the next generation of scientists and engineers. After a brief introduction to QC concepts, the focus of this article is to explore the interplay between the fields of visualization and QC. First, visualization has played a role in QC by providing the means to show representations of the quantum state of single-qubits in superposition states and multiple-qubits in entangled states. Second, there are a number of ways in which the field of visual data exploration and analysis may potentially benefit from this disruptive new technology though there are challenges going forward.
Quantum computing has entered a stage of increasing practicality. Many quantum hardware vendors such as IBM, Rigetti, Honeywell, and IonQ now enable experiments on real devices in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. These platforms show computational advantages in domains such as optimization, machine learning, and materials science. However, they remain limited by hardware noise and the absence of human-interpretable information. Existing visual metaphors, such as the Bloch Sphere for single-qubit states or circuit schematics for algorithm design, struggle to convey multi-qubit entanglement or measurement probabilities in ways accessible to human reasoning. Likewise, the rise of variational quantum circuits and quantum neural networks (QNNs) introduces new layers of opacity: how data are encoded into quantum states and how parameters evolve through training remain largely under-explored. These challenges motivate a need for visual explanation frameworks that unveil the invisible processes of quantum computing visible, interpretable, and reasonable.To address these challenges, this dissertation presents a coherent sequence of visual analytics systems that progressively enhance explainability across the hardware, state, circuit, and model layers of quantum computing. First, VACSEN supports noise-aware execution by visually correlating hardware fidelity metrics with compiled quantum circuits, allowing users to identify unstable qubits, track temporal noise evolution, and select optimal execution strategies. Second, VENUS introduces a geometric representation for quantum state visualization, combining right triangles and semicircles to jointly encode amplitude and probability information, thereby enabling intuitive exploration of superposition and entanglement beyond the traditional Bloch Sphere. Third, QuantumEyes extends interpretability to quantum circuit behavior, integrating coordinated views to reveal how quantum gates transform amplitudes and probabilities during algorithm execution (e.g., Grover’s search or the Quantum Fourier Transform). Finally, VIOLET applies visual explainability to quantum neural networks, bridging concepts from explainable AI and quantum computing. It visualizes the encoding of classical data into quantum states, tracks parameter dynamics during variational training, and exposes learned features and measurement distributions, establishing the first end-to-end system for understanding QNNs.Each system was designed through iterative co-design with quantum computing experts and evaluated through case studies, task analyses, and in-depth interviews involving researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. Across evaluations, participants reported that visualization significantly enhanced their ability to reason about noise effects, understand quantum-state evolution, and interpret the learning behavior of QNNs. These findings demonstrate that visualization not only accelerates analysis and debugging but also strengthens conceptual understanding and user trust in quantum computing. To sum up, this dissertation establishes visualization