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International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Embedded Design (ISED)

Transferable Agentic AI for Accelerating Quantum Algorithm Discovery: Meta-Learning and AutoML for Parameterized Quantum Circuits

Satyanarayana Burugupalli

Published Dec 17, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Discovering effective parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) remains a major obstacle in the noisy intermediatescale quantum (NISQ) era due to barren plateaus, noise sensitivity, and heavy trial-and-error in ansatz selection and initialization. We propose Q-Transfer-Search, a transferable agentic AI framework that unifies meta-learning and automated machine learning (AutoML) to accelerate quantum algorithm discovery. Our method learns reusable parameter priors via meta-learning, enabling fast adaptation to new tasks, while a noise-aware architecture controller proposes PQCs optimized for hardware constraints. A measurement-efficient evaluator based on classical shadows and parameter-shift rules provides low-cost feedback for both inner and outer optimization loops. Evaluations on VQE, QAOA, and quantum machine learning tasks show that Q-Transfer-Search achieves lower energy errors, higher approximation ratios, and improved classification accuracy while reducing circuit evaluations and measurement shots. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines such as QuantumNAS, Meta-VQA, Q-MAML, and MG-Net, our framework consistently improves convergence speed and robustness. These results highlight the promise of agentic AI in enabling scalable, transferable, and resource-efficient quantum algorithm design.

DOI
10.1109/ised67359.2025.11404979

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Quantum computing combined with machine learning, is a promising emerging field for tackling problems that are extremely expensive or fundamentally infeasible for classical computers. Nonetheless, design of the optimal quantum circuit for machine learning is a major challenge, which can be attributed to the exponential search space of the quantum gate arrangement and unmatched structured design methods. To resolve this, our work introduces a novel automated framework for quantum architecture search (AQAS) that adopts both meta-learning and evolutionary algorithms to automatically learn, transfer, and optimize quantum circuit architectures to suit different machine learning tasks. Our strategy relies on meta-learning to introduce a learning scheme, i.e. it allows the AQAS system to generalize across distributions by learning from a shared structural and functional prior from the distribution of machine learning problems. This enables the approach to quickly home in effective quantum circuit implementations for new tasks with low data or retraining. At the same time, we use evolutionary algorithms– mimicking natural selection– to breed populations of quantum circuit architectures. These circuits are represented in genotypes, are varied under mutation and crossover, and are selected according to a fitness function that blends quantum resource utilization (e.g., depth, qubits) with task-specific performance (e.g., classification accuracy or loss). The architecture is realized in a mixed quantum-classical environment, with quantum circuits simulated on quantum simulators and/or Noisy-Intermediate-Scale-Quantum (NISQ) devices. We verify the effectiveness of our approach on a number of benchmarked datasets and tasks which range from quantum-aided image recognition, time series prediction to medical diagnostics. We demonstrate that AQAS can discover compact, high-performing quantum models, which generalize better and are computationally more efficient than the custom-built quantum models.
Abstract Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) have been successfully applied to quantum approximate optimization algorithms, variational quantum compiling and quantum machine learning models. The performances of VQAs largely depend on the architecture of parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs). Quantum architecture search (QAS) aims to automate the design of PQCs in different VQAs with classical optimization algorithms. However, current QAS algorithms do not use prior experiences and search the quantum architecture from scratch for each new task, which is inefficient and time consuming. In this paper, a meta quantum architecture search (MetaQAS) algorithm is proposed, which learns good initialization heuristics of the architecture (i.e., meta‐architecture), along with the meta‐parameters of quantum gates from a number of training tasks such that they can adapt to new tasks with fewer gradient updates, which leads to fast learning on new tasks. The proposed MetaQAS can be used with arbitrary gradient‐based QAS algorithms. Simulation results on variational quantum compiling (VQC) and quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) show that the architectures optimized by MetaQAS converge faster than a state‐of‐the‐art gradient‐based QAS algorithm, namely DQAS. MetaQAS also achieves a better solution than DQAS after fine‐tuning of gate parameters.
Variational quantum circuits (VQCs) constitute a central building block of near-term quantum machine learning (QML), yet the principled design of expressive and trainable architectures remains a major open challenge. The VQC design space grows combinatorially with the number of qubits, layers, entanglement structures, and gate parameterizations, rendering manual circuit construction inefficient and often suboptimal. We introduce an autonomous agent-based framework for VQC architecture search that integrates high-level reasoning with a quantum simulation environment. The agent proposes candidate circuit architectures, evaluates them through fully automated training and validation pipelines, and iteratively improves its design strategy via performance-driven feedback. Empirically, we show that the agent autonomously evolves circuit architectures from simple initial ansätze toward increasingly expressive designs, progressively trying to improve task performance. This demonstrates that agentic AI can effectively navigate and refine the VQC design landscape with minimal human intervention, providing a scalable methodology for automated quantum model development in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) regime.