Quantumcomputers exhibit significant potential for addressing problems that are intractable by classical computing. Nevertheless, the scalability of quantum architectures remains a pivotal challenge within the field. Current efforts for increasing the number of qubits. However, using these architectures implies dealing with new hardware and algorithmic challenges. The primary focus of this thesis is the partitioning of quantum circuits across multiple cores; a task classified as an NP-hard problem. While classical algorithms often struggle with execution time and scalability, Machine Learning (ML) has emerged as a promising, faster yet powerful alternative. This thesis presents a novel approach for circuit partitioning in multi-core quantum architectures using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) with graph neural networks (GNN). This methodology provides a flexible and efficient framework, enabling the partitioning of circuits with varying numbers of qubits while maintaining high performance and scalability.
Quantumcomputers exhibit significant potential for addressing problems that are intractable by classical computing. Nevertheless, the scalability of quantum architectures remains a pivotal challenge within the field. Current efforts for increasing the number of qubits. However, using these architectures implies dealing with new hardware and algorithmic challenges. The primary focus of this thesis is the partitioning of quantum circuits across multiple cores; a task classified as an NP-hard problem. While classical algorithms often struggle with execution time and scalability, Machine Learning (ML) has emerged as a promising, faster yet powerful alternative. This thesis presents a novel approach for circuit partitioning in multi-core quantum architectures using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) with graph neural networks (GNN). This methodology provides a flexible and efficient framework, enabling the partitioning of circuits with varying numbers of qubits while maintaining high performance and scalability.
Quantum computing holds immense potential for solving classically intractable problems by leveraging the unique properties of quantum mechanics. The scalability of quantum architectures remains a significant challenge. Multi-core quantum architectures are proposed to solve the scalability problem, arising a new set of challenges in hardware, communications and compilation, among others. One of these challenges is to adapt a quantum algorithm to fit within the different cores of the quantum computer. This paper presents a novel approach for circuit partitioning using Deep Reinforcement Learning, contributing to the advancement of both quantum computing and graph partitioning. This work is the first step in integrating Deep Reinforcement Learning techniques into Quantum Circuit Mapping, opening the door to a new paradigm of solutions to such problems.
Modular, distributed and multi-core architectures are currently considered a promising approach for scalability of quantum computing systems. The integration of multiple Quantum Processing Units necessitates classical and quantum-coherent communication, introducing challenges related to noise and quantum decoherence in quantum state transfers between cores. Optimizing communication becomes imperative, and the compilation and mapping of quantum circuits onto physical qubits must minimize state transfers while adhering to architectural constraints. The compilation process, inherently an NP-hard problem, demands extensive search times even with a small number of qubits to be solved to optimality. To address this challenge efficiently, we advocate for the utilization of heuristic mappers that can rapidly generate solutions. In this work, we propose a novel approach employing Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods to learn these heuristics for a specific multi-core architecture. Our DRL agent incorporates a Transformer encoder and Graph Neural Networks. It encodes quantum circuits using self-attention mechanisms and produce outputs through an attention-based pointer mechanism that directly signifies the probability of matching logical qubits with physical cores. This enables the selection of optimal cores for logical qubits efficiently. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed method can outperform baseline approaches in terms of reducing inter-core communications and minimizing online time-to-solution. This research contributes to the advancement of scalable quantum computing systems by introducing a novel learning-based heuristic approach for efficient quantum circuit compilation and mapping.
Abstract Modular quantum architectures have emerged as a promising approach for scaling quantum computing systems by connecting multiple Quantum Processing Units (QPUs). However, this approach introduces significant challenges due to costly inter-core operations between chips and quantum state transfers, which contribute to noise and quantum decoherence. This paper presents QARMA, a novel Qubit mapping using Attention-based deep Reinforcement learning (DRL) for Modular quantum Architectures, along with its extension QARMA-R that incorporates dynamic qubit reuse capabilities. Our approach combines an attention-based mechanism with Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to learn optimal qubit allocation, routing, and reuse strategies that minimize inter-core communications.Our experimental results show significant improvements over state-of-the-art approaches. Compared to highly-optimized Qiskit with modular architecture configuration, QARMA-R reduces inter-core communications by up to 100% (on average 86%), while QARMA maintains 15-40% improvement for larger circuits without reuse. Against traditional modular qubit mapping, our approach achieves 97-100% reduction in inter-core operation.The proposed methods advance quantum circuit compilation techniques and enable the execution of more extensive quantum algorithms on resource-constrained modular quantum systems, contributing to the growing body of research on scalable quantum computing architectures.
The scaling of quantum processors is currently limited by technical challenges such as decoherence and cross- talk. As the number of qubits grows, the interference between them adds more noise to the computations. Distributed quantum computing addresses this limitation by interconnecting smaller, easier-to-handle quantum cores, but it introduces the challenge of minimizing slow, error-prone inter-core communication. The task of distributing quantum circuits across cores to minimize communication costs is known as the Qubit Allocation problem. This work is centered on finding a deep learning approach to this problem, focusing on scalability and improving the state-of-the-art performance. Classical algorithms like the Hungarian Qubit Allocation (HQA) currently represent the state of the art, but they suffer from poor scalability with circuit size. In contrast, existing Deep Learning optimizations like Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches often lack flexibility, requiring retraining if hardware configurations change, and are far from the solution quality of classical methods. However, these are worth exploring due to the good scalability and execution times. To overcome these limitations, this thesis proposes a flexible, transformer-based architecture capable of handling arbitrary numbers of qubits and cores without retraining. The policy is trained using a combination of REINFORCE and Group Relative Policy Optimization, two well-known RL algorithms. Furthermore, to explore the test-time compute paradigm applied to this problem, we introduce QAllocZero, an AlphaZero-inspired tree search algorithm we implemented in C++ that utilizes the trained policy as a heuristic. The results show that the trained policy achieves up to 33% improvement in allocation cost with respect to the state of the art (HQA) for the Cuccaro Adder and narrows the gap between RL and HQA for the most common circuits while maintaining scalable execution time. These findings show that learning-based approaches can effectively break the computational bottlenecks of classical algorithms, a crucial step for managing future systems with millions of qubits. All the code is open source and can be found in the porject's repository (https://github.com/Vicara12/MAI-TFM_RL_Qubit_Allocation).
The scaling of quantum processors is currently limited by technical challenges such as decoherence and cross-talk. As the number of qubits grows, interference increases the computational noise. Distributed quantum computing addresses these limitations by interconnecting smaller, easier-to-handle quantum processors (cores), but it introduces the challenge of minimizing slow, error-prone inter-core communication. The task of distributing quantum circuits across cores while minimizing communication costs is known as the Qubit Allocation problem. This work focuses on developing a deep learning approach to this problem, emphasizing flexibility to quantum hardware topology and improving state-of-the-art performance. Heuristic and non-learning algorithms, such as the Hungarian Qubit Allocation (HQA), currently represent the state of the art. Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches leverage learned allocation policies but often lack flexibility, requiring retraining when hardware configurations change, and they fall short of the solution quality achieved by non-learning methods. However, learning mechanisms could outperform human-crafted heuristics. To overcome these limitations, this work proposes a flexible, transformer-based architecture that can handle arbitrary numbers of qubits and cores without retraining. Results show that the trained policy consistently outperforms the previous RL state of the art and narrows the gap between RL and HQA for the most common circuits. It achieves a 33% reduction in allocation cost relative to the HQA for the Cuccaro Adder and 25% on average for random circuits. These findings show that learning-based approaches can effectively match the performance of hand-crafted heuristics, a crucial step towards their application in real-world scenarios.
Quantum networks attract increasing attention due to their unique advantages over classical networks. However, the challenge of efficiently and economically constructing reliable wide-area quantum networks remains unresolved. This problem, termed network planning, is typically modeled as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem. Existing solver-based solutions for classical networks face scalability issues, while heuristic approaches that sacrifice optimality for scalability heavily rely on human expertise and lack generalizability. Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has demonstrated potential in adaptive decision-making for classical network planning. However, quantum networks introduce unique constraints due to their end-to-end entanglement distribution requirements. To address this, we propose a two-stage quantum network resource allocation framework, QPLAN, that combines multi-agent DRL with traditional optimization solvers. Our approach uses a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning strategy using graph neural networks (GNNs) and transformers for traffic flow and corresponding hardware resource allocation to minimize hardware cost while cooperatively satisfying problem constraints as much as possible. The output of the DRL algorithm is then used as an initial input to prune the solution space, "warm-starting" the ILP solver and further improving the solution. This hybrid approach effectively reduces manual effort and enhances scalability. Experimental results show that our method yields near-optimal solutions with better scalability than only using ILP solvers.