Quantum neural networks (QNNs) represent an emerging technology that uses a quantum computer for neural network computations. The QNNs have demonstrated potential advantages over classical neural networks in certain tasks. As a core component of a QNN, the parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) plays a crucial role in determining the QNN's overall performance. However, quantum circuit architectures designed manually based on experience or using specific hardware structures can suffer from inefficiency due to the introduction of redundant quantum gates, which amplifies the impact of noise on system performance. Recent studies have suggested that the advantages of quantum evolutionary algorithms (QEAs) in terms of precision and convergence speed can provide an effective solution to quantum circuit architecture-related problems. Currently, most QEAs adopt a fixed rotation mode in the evolution process, and a lack of an adaptive updating mode can cause the QEAs to fall into a local optimum and make it difficult for them to converge. To address these problems, this study proposes an adaptive quantum evolution algorithm (AQEA). First, an adaptive mechanism is introduced to the evolution process, and the strategy of combining two dynamic rotation angles is adopted. Second, to prevent the fluctuations of the population's offspring, the elite retention of the parents is used to ensure the inheritance of good genes. Finally, when the population falls into a local optimum, a quantum catastrophe mechanism is employed to break the current population state. The experimental results show that compared with the QNN structure based on manual design and QEA search, the proposed AQEA can reduce the number of network parameters by up to 20% and increase the accuracy by 7.21%. Moreover, in noisy environments, the AQEA-optimized circuit outperforms traditional circuits in maintaining high fidelity, and its excellent noise resistance provides strong support for the reliability of quantum computing.
Quantum neural networks (QNNs) represent an emerging technology that uses a quantum computer for neural network computations. The QNNs have demonstrated potential advantages over classical neural networks in certain tasks. As a core component of a QNN, the parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) plays a crucial role in determining the QNN's overall performance. However, quantum circuit architectures designed manually based on experience or using specific hardware structures can suffer from inefficiency due to the introduction of redundant quantum gates, which amplifies the impact of noise on system performance. Recent studies have suggested that the advantages of quantum evolutionary algorithms (QEAs) in terms of precision and convergence speed can provide an effective solution to quantum circuit architecture-related problems. Currently, most QEAs adopt a fixed rotation mode in the evolution process, and a lack of an adaptive updating mode can cause the QEAs to fall into a local optimum and make it difficult for them to converge. To address these problems, this study proposes an adaptive quantum evolution algorithm (AQEA). First, an adaptive mechanism is introduced to the evolution process, and the strategy of combining two dynamic rotation angles is adopted. Second, to prevent the fluctuations of the population's offspring, the elite retention of the parents is used to ensure the inheritance of good genes. Finally, when the population falls into a local optimum, a quantum catastrophe mechanism is employed to break the current population state. The experimental results show that compared with the QNN structure based on manual design and QEA search, the proposed AQEA can reduce the number of network parameters by up to 20% and increase the accuracy by 7.21%. Moreover, in noisy environments, the AQEA-optimized circuit outperforms traditional circuits in maintaining high fidelity, and its excellent noise resistance provides strong support for the reliability of quantum computing.
This paper introduces the Adaptive Quantum Evolutionary Algorithm (AQEA), a novel quantum evolutionary algorithm designed to optimize complex systems by dynamically adjusting parameter and structural configurations. Traditional evolutionary algorithms often lack inherent adaptability, while AQEA leverages quantum evolution to achieve automated optimization and adaptation. The core mechanism involves a quantum evolution process that iteratively refines system parameters and structures based on the system's state, resulting in improved performance and robustness. This paper details the algorithm's architecture, key operational steps, and preliminary results demonstrating its effectiveness in a simulated optimization problem. The core claim is that AQEA offers a significant improvement in optimization efficiency and adaptability compared to existing evolutionary algorithms.
Quantum architecture search (QAS) is desired to construct a powerful and general QAS platform which can significantly accelerate quantum advantages in error-prone and depth limited quantum circuits in today Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary-based quantum architecture search (EQAS) scheme for the optimal layout to balance the higher expressive power and the trainable ability. In EQAS, each layout of quantum circuits, i.e quantum circuit architecture(QCA), is first encoded into a binary string, which is called quantum genes later. Then, an algorithm to remove the redundant parameters in QCA is performed according to the eigenvalues of the corresponding quantum Fisher information matrix (QFIM). Later, each QCA is evaluated by the normalized fitness, so that the sampling rate could be obtained to sample the parent generation by the Roulette Wheel selection strategy. Thereafter, the mutation and crossover are applied to get the next generation. EQAS is verified by the classification task in quantum machine learning for three datasets. The results show that the proposed EQAS can search for the optimal QCA with less parameterized gates, and the higher accuracies are obtained by adopting EQAS for the classification tasks over three dataset.
Designing effective quantum circuits remains a central challenge in quantum computing, as circuit structure strongly influences expressivity, trainability, and hardware feasibility. Current approaches, whether using manually designed circuit templates, fixed heuristics, or automated rules, face limitations in scalability, flexibility, and adaptability, often producing circuits that are poorly matched to the specific problem or quantum hardware. In this work, we propose the Evolutionary eXploration of Augmenting Quantum Circuits (EXAQC), an evolutionary approach to the automated design and training of parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) which leverages and extends on strategies from neuroevolution and genetic programming. The proposed method jointly searches over gate types, qubit connectivity, parameterization, and circuit depth while respecting hardware and noise constraints. The method supports both Qiskit and Pennylane libraries, allowing the user to configure every aspect. This work highlights evolutionary search as a critical tool for advancing quantum machine learning and variational quantum algorithms, providing a principled pathway toward scalable, problem-aware, and hardware-efficient quantum circuit design. Preliminary results demonstrate that circuits evolved on classification tasks are able to achieve over 90% accuracy on most of the benchmark datasets with a limited computational budget, and are able to emulate target circuit quantum states with high fidelity scores.
Quantum neural architecture search (QNAS) has emerged as a promising approach for automatically designing parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) for near-term quantum machine learning tasks. However, quantum evolutionary algorithm (QEA)-based QNAS methods often suffer from slow distribution concentration and insufficient update adaptivity in high-dimensional discrete search spaces, which limits both search efficiency and final model performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes Structural Probability Adaptive Quantum Neural Architecture Search (SPA-QNAS), a search-dynamics-enhanced QNAS method built upon the EQNAS benchmark framework. SPA-QNAS introduces two complementary mechanisms into the QPV-driven evolutionary search loop: Structural Probability Enhancement (SPE) and Adaptive Evolutionary Control (AEC). SPE reinforces elite structural decisions to accelerate the concentration of the structural sampling distribution toward high-fitness regions, while AEC adaptively regulates the rotation updates of non-elite individuals according to fitness feedback, thereby improving update stability and suppressing ineffective disturbances. Under the same search space, circuit template, and quantum resource budget as EQNAS, SPA-QNAS is evaluated on the MNIST and Warship benchmark datasets. Experimental results across multiple independent runs demonstrate that SPA-QNAS achieves higher classification accuracy and more stable performance compared with EQNAS. In representative experiments, SPA-QNAS achieves classification accuracies of 99.42% on MNIST and 85.33% on Warship under the same search space and quantum resource budget as EQNAS. These results indicate that improving QPV-based evolutionary update dynamics is an effective way to enhance the stability and robustness of QNAS under fixed quantum resource constraints.
Quantum variational algorithms (VQAs) are highly promising to realize quantum advantages on near-term quantum devices. Existing VQAs based on a manually fixed quantum are computationally inefficient due to noise and the limited coupling maps of these devices. Previous work considers various quantum architecture search (QAS) algorithms to autodesign a quantum based on specific questions to improve the performance of VQAs. Compared to manual design, autodesign can more efficiently explore the large space of a possible and achieve better performance. However, two main challenges in utilizing QAS to design quantum circuits efficiently are the tremendous amount of space required for candidate quantum circuits, and the disconnection between quantum devices and autodesign in terms of qubit mapping and quantum noise. To address these issues, we propose an adaptive diversity-based quantum search algorithm to efficiently generate the optimal quantum circuit based on device qubit mapping and noise. By considering the diversity among different candidate circuits and adaptively adding circuit depths, our approach only needs to focus on a small optimization space at each iteration step. In addition, the synchronization of optimizing circuit structure and aligning qubit mapping enables us to generate quantum circuits while avoiding additional mapping overhead. We evaluate the performance of our algorithm on simulators and real quantum devices for quantum eigenvalue problems and classification tasks. Results demonstrate that quantum circuits generated by our method outperform both a fixed hardware-efficient and randomly generated quantum circuits in terms of final performance and resource-saving. Our algorithm provides a flexible way to efficiently generate excellent quantum circuits for significantly improving the performances of VQAs on near-term quantum devices. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Although quantum computers will not necessarily transform ML in general, they hold immense potential for specific uses, such as dealing with high-dimensional data and complex correlations that cannot be effectively modeled using classical systems. It is, however, difficult to design efficient quantum circuits, especially with the existing Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) hardware that has constraints including decoherence, a limited number of qubits, and gate fidelity limitations. The authors propose an Adaptive Quantum Circuit Architecture Search (AQCAS) framework whose structure and parameters are optimized dynamically to improve the performance of the task-specific ML. The framework integrates quantum circuit encoding, a hybrid search strategy that is based on reinforcement learning and evolutionary algorithms, and a task-specific adaptivity mechanism. Benchmark datasets were used for experimental evaluations of both simulation using Qiskit Aer and classical optimization using the Python frameworks TensorFlow and PennyLane. Fixed and standard variational quantum circuits were compared with performance measurements like the classification accuracy, circuit depth, convergence speed, and computational efficiency. The results show that the accuracy of AQCAS can be raised to 94.1%, and the circuit depth is lowered at the same time. It converged rapidly and is computationally efficient. Ablation studies show that both hybrid search and adaptivity mechanisms help to enhance generalization and stability under NISQ constraints. The results demonstrate the potential of AQCAS as a practical approach to using adaptive quantum circuits in specialized ML applications, and lay the groundwork for future development of scaling to larger devices, implementing noise-aware optimization, and integrating with hybrid quantum-classical ML pipelines.