Quantum circuit transpilation is central to the execution of programs on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, yet it introduces reliability risks due to heuristic optimizations, parameter thresholds, and layout heuristics. Small perturbations at these decision points can silently alter program semantics, undermine optimization effectiveness, or increase hardware error susceptibility. In this work, we present a concolic testing framework for quantum compilers that systematically uncovers such vulnerabilities by combining concrete execution with symbolic reasoning. We identify and recover decision points in gate-level, parameter-sensitive, and circuit-level transpiler passes, and construct symbolic guards to drive targeted perturbations near boundary conditions. Our evaluation on representative QASMBench circuits demonstrates complete decision-point and boundary coverage of 100%, and high outcome coverage of 78%, uncovering both missed optimizations and semantic deviations in widely used Qiskit passes. These results establish that concolic testing can be applied as a practical methodology for systematically evaluating compiler robustness in the NISQ era.
Quantum circuit transpilation is central to the execution of programs on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, yet it introduces reliability risks due to heuristic optimizations, parameter thresholds, and layout heuristics. Small perturbations at these decision points can silently alter program semantics, undermine optimization effectiveness, or increase hardware error susceptibility. In this work, we present a concolic testing framework for quantum compilers that systematically uncovers such vulnerabilities by combining concrete execution with symbolic reasoning. We identify and recover decision points in gate-level, parameter-sensitive, and circuit-level transpiler passes, and construct symbolic guards to drive targeted perturbations near boundary conditions. Our evaluation on representative QASMBench circuits demonstrates complete decision-point and boundary coverage of 100%, and high outcome coverage of 78%, uncovering both missed optimizations and semantic deviations in widely used Qiskit passes. These results establish that concolic testing can be applied as a practical methodology for systematically evaluating compiler robustness in the NISQ era.
Quantum compilers play a critical role in transforming high-level quantum programs into optimized, hardware-compatible circuits. However, verifying the correctness of compiler passes remains challenging, as determining the expected output of large, deeply entangled quantum circuits is computationally intractable. This challenge is further amplified when compiler passes modify already complex circuit structures, making manual validation of transformed circuits impractical.
In this work, we perform a systematic analysis of unit tests for quantum compiler passes in four quantum programming frameworks (PennyLane, Qiskit, Cirq, and pytket). Our findings indicate validation is dominated by program-content and program-metric assertions, and test circuits are generally small and shallow. Motivated by these observations, we introduce a testing methodology for automated validation of quantum compiler passes based on retromorphic testing and principles from the Hadamard test. This methodology analyzes a compiler pass, test circuit, and expected pass behavior to verify semantic preservation and intended structural modifications.
We implement our methods in a framework, RetroQ, and apply it to compiler passes in PennyLane and Qiskit. Experimental evaluation reproduced several existing bugs as well as uncovered previously undetected defects, such as flawed symbolic parameter handling, incorrect commutation logic, failure to recognize self-adjointness of gates, and runtime crashes. These findings highlight the need for compiler-pass-specific testing methodologies to improve the reliability of the evolving quantum software stack.
This paper presents the first concolic testing framework explicitly designed for quantum programs. The framework introduces quantum constraint generation methods for quantum control statements that quantify quantum states and offers a symbolization method for quantum variables. Based on this framework, we generate path constraints for each concrete execution path of a quantum program. These constraints guide the exploration of new paths, with a quantum constraint solver determining outcomes to create novel input samples, thereby enhancing branch coverage. Our framework has been implemented in Python and integrated with Qiskit for practical evaluation. Experimental results show that our concolic testing framework improves branch coverage, generates high-quality quantum input samples, and detects bugs, demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency in quantum programming and bug detection. Regarding branch coverage, our framework achieves more than 74.27% on quantum programs with under 5 qubits.
The rapid evolution of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices has intensified the need for robust compilation strategies capable of mitigating hardware-induced errors while maximizing computational efficiency. Quantum compilers play a pivotal role in translating high-level quantum algorithms into hardware-executable instructions, yet they face significant challenges related to qubit connectivity constraints, limited coherence times, and stochastic noise. This paper examines error-resilient quantum compiler design for efficient qubit mapping, gate optimization, and noise mitigation in NISQ-era devices, proposing a framework that integrates topology-aware mapping, adaptive gate synthesis, and probabilistic error suppression techniques. By synthesizing advances in quantum circuit optimization, hardware-aware scheduling, and hybrid classical–quantum error correction strategies, the study evaluates how compiler-level innovations can substantially enhance execution fidelity and resource efficiency. The findings suggest that intelligent compiler architectures are critical enablers of practical quantum advantage during the transitional NISQ phase, bridging theoretical algorithm design with real-world hardware constraints.
Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers consisting of tens of inherently noisy quantum bits (qubits) suffer from reliability problems. Qubits and their gates are susceptible to various types of errors. Due to limited numbers of qubits and high error rates, quantum error correction cannot be applied. Physical constraints of quantum hardware including the error rates are used to guide the design and the layout of quantum circuits. The error rates determine the selection of qubits and their operations. The resulting circuit is executed on the quantum computer. This study explores the risk of unexpected changes in the error rates of NISQ computers post-calibration. We show that unexpected changes in error rates can alter the output state of a quantum circuit. To detect these changes, we propose the insertion of test points into the quantum circuit to enable online monitoring of the physical qubit behavior. We utilize classical, superposition, and uncompute test points. Furthermore, we use a gate error coverage metric to assess the quality of the tests. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme on different IBM quantum computers (IBM Q), in addition to a noisy simulation that shows the scalability of the proposed approach.
Quantum computing has the potential to solve a wide variety of classically intractable problems. However, the inherent complexity, probabilistic behavior, and fragility of quantum systems pose significant challenges to ensuring the correctness and reliability of quantum programs. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview of functional testing and validation techniques aimed at addressing these challenges for quantum circuits. We begin by outlining the unique characteristics of quantum systems that complicate traditional testing methodologies, including the absence of classical oracles, non-determinism due to quantum measurement, and the exponential growth of the state space. We then categorize and analyze a wide range of functional testing and validation techniques that have emerged to meet these challenges, including mutation testing, fuzz testing, and coverage testing. We further explore advanced semantic and white-box methods such as property-based testing, metamorphic testing, equivalence checking, fault testing, assertions, and concolic testing. Specifically, we discuss the applicability of these testing techniques to quantum circuits and examine their limitations in the current NISQ (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) era.
Quantum computing hardware is affected by quantum noise that undermine the quality of results of an executed quantum program. Amongst other quantum noises, coherent error that caused by parameter drifting and miscalibration, remains critical. While coherent error mitigation has been studied before, studies focused either on gate-level or pulse-level -- missing cross-level optimization opportunities; And most of them only target single-qubit gates -- while multi-qubit gates are also used in practice. To address above limitations, this work proposes a cross-layer approach for coherent error mitigation that considers program-level, gate-level, and pulse-level compiler optimizations, by leveraging the hidden inverse theory, and exploiting the structure inside different quantum programs, while also considering multi-qubit gates. We implemented our approach as compiler optimization passes, and integrated into IBM Qiskit framework. We tested our technique on real quantum computer (IBM-Brisbane), and demonstrated up to 92% fidelity improvements (45% on average), on several benchmarks.