Quantum unitary synthesis addresses the problem of translating abstract quantum algorithms into sequences of hardware-executable quantum gates. Solving this task exactly is infeasible in general due to the exponential growth of the underlying combinatorial search space. Existing approaches suffer from misaligned optimization objectives, substantial training costs and limited generalization across different qubit counts. We mitigate these limitations by using supervised learning to approximate the minimum description length of residual unitaries and combining this estimate with stochastic beam search to identify near optimal gate sequences. Our method relies on a lightweight model with zero-shot generalization, substantially reducing training overhead compared to prior baselines. Across multiple benchmarks, we achieve faster wall-clock synthesis times while exceeding state-of-the-art methods in terms of success rate for complex circuits.
Quantum unitary synthesis addresses the problem of translating abstract quantum algorithms into sequences of hardware-executable quantum gates. Solving this task exactly is infeasible in general due to the exponential growth of the underlying combinatorial search space. Existing approaches suffer from misaligned optimization objectives, substantial training costs and limited generalization across different qubit counts. We mitigate these limitations by using supervised learning to approximate the minimum description length of residual unitaries and combining this estimate with stochastic beam search to identify near optimal gate sequences. Our method relies on a lightweight model with zero-shot generalization, substantially reducing training overhead compared to prior baselines. Across multiple benchmarks, we achieve faster wall-clock synthesis times while exceeding state-of-the-art methods in terms of success rate for complex circuits.
Quantum unitary synthesis addresses the problem of translating abstract quantum algorithms into sequences of hardware-executable quantum gates. Solving this task exactly is infeasible in general due to the exponential growth of the underlying combinatorial search space. Existing approaches suffer from misaligned optimization objectives, substantial training costs and limited generalization across different qubit counts. We mitigate these limitations by using supervised learning to approximate the minimum description length of residual unitaries and combining this estimate with stochastic beam search to identify near optimal gate sequences. Our method relies on a lightweight model with zero-shot generalization, substantially reducing training overhead compared to prior baselines. Across multiple benchmarks, we achieve faster wall-clock synthesis times while exceeding state-of-the-art methods in terms of success rate for complex circuits.
This paper presents a deep reinforcement learning approach for synthesizing unitaries into quantum circuits. Unitary synthesis aims to identify a quantum circuit that represents a given unitary while minimizing circuit depth, total gate count, a specific gate count, or a combination of these factors. While past research has focused predominantly on continuous gate sets, synthesizing unitaries from the parameter-free Clifford+T gate set remains a challenge. Although the time complexity of this task will inevitably remain exponential in the number of qubits for general unitaries, reducing the runtime for simple problem instances still poses a significant challenge. In this study, we apply the tree-search method Gumbel AlphaZero to solve the problem for a subset of exactly synthesizable Clifford+T unitaries. Our method effectively synthesizes circuits for up to five qubits generated from randomized circuits with up to 60 gates, outperforming existing tools like QuantumCircuitOpt and MIN-T-SYNTH in terms of synthesis time for larger qubit counts. Furthermore, it surpasses Synthetiq in successfully synthesizing random, exactly synthesizable unitaries. These results establish a strong baseline for future unitary synthesis algorithms.
In the Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, finding implementations of quantum algorithms that mini-mize the number of expensive and error prone multi-qubit gates is vital to ensure computations produce meaningful outputs. Unitary synthesis, the process of finding a quantum circuit that implements some target unitary matrix, is able to solve this problem optimally in many cases. However, current bottom-up unitary synthesis algorithms are limited by their exponentially growing run times. We show how applying machine learning to unitary datasets permits drastic speedups for synthesis algorithms. This paper presents QSeed, a seeded synthesis algorithm that employs a learned model to quickly propose resource efficient circuit implementations of unitaries. QSeed maintains low gate counts and offers a speedup of 3.7 x in synthesis time over the state of the art for a 64 qubit modular exponentiation circuit, a core component in Shor's factoring algorithm. QSeed's performance improvements also generalize to families of circuits not seen during the training process.
Training parameterized quantum circuits requires balancing optimization progress with limited evaluation budgets and the statistical uncertainty of near-term quantum hardware. We present a modular benchmarking framework that separates quantum search-direction estimation from classical parameter-update rules, allowing their interactions and sensitivities to be examined independently. We evaluate a suite of gradient-based, stochastic, and derivative-free optimizers across combinatorial optimization using the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), supervised quantum machine learning using Iris classification and a quantum convolutional neural network (QCNN) for binary MNIST classification, and quantum chemistry using the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) for molecular hydrogen. By separating objective evaluations from sample-circuit costs under finite-shot simulation and physical execution on a 156-qubit processor, we compare optimizer behavior across workloads with different parameter counts and measurement requirements. Four selected simulator and hardware case studies report terminal and best observed objectives separately, alongside post-training classifier accuracies. The comparisons include selected MaxCut and hydrogen trajectories and illustrate workload-dependent objective changes and evaluation costs, while the simulator benchmark compares both peak and mean performance across three seeds. The hardware runs do not establish an optimizer ranking or isolate a causal effect of device noise.
Unitary synthesis is the process of decomposing a target unitary transformation into a sequence of quantum gates. This is a challenging task, as the number of possible gate combinations grows exponentially with the circuit depth. In this manuscript, we propose an approach using an AlphaZero-inspired reinforcement-learning agent for the exact compilation of unitaries using discrete sets of logic gates. The approach achieves low inference time and proves versatile across different gate sets, and qubit connectivities. Leveraging this flexibility, we explore unitary synthesis with dynamic circuits -- circuits that contain non-unitary operations such as measurements and conditional gates -- and discover unusual implementations of logical quantum gates. Although the direct synthesis of complete algorithms is intractable, our approach is well suited for efficiently synthesizing subroutines. This may have a significant impact when these subroutines are invoked repeatedly during algorithm execution.
Abstract Quantum circuit synthesis becomes increasingly challenging as system sizes grow and hardware-native gate sets diversify. Denoising diffusion models have recently been applied to quantum circuit synthesis as an alternative to expensive classical optimization. Existing diffusion-based approaches, however, either operate on discrete gate alphabets or separate gate identities and continuous parameters into different generative streams, which raises the question of whether a unified representation can more naturally encode structure–parameter dependencies. We propose a hybrid diffusion–optimization framework for quantum circuit synthesis with continuous native gates. Taking a trapped-ion-inspired native gate set as a representative example, our single-stream diffusion model operates directly on a continuous-parameter gate set { R X ( θ ), R Y ( θ ), R XX ( θ )} and produces fully parameterized circuits in a single diffusion sampling run. A lightweight gradient-based post-optimization of the continuous parameters, based on the process infidelity, then corrects residual stochastic errors. Trained and evaluated on random three-qubit unitaries, the model generates compact circuits that accurately approximate unseen targets. Under identical training conditions, the continuous-gate formulation achieves substantially lower process infidelity than both random-circuit and a discrete-gate diffusion baseline. Furthermore, applying gradient-based post-optimization to the continuous-gate diffusion output yields a significant additional improvement in fidelity compared with the same model without post-optimization, demonstrating that this refinement step is an effective strategy for correcting residual stochastic errors in the diffusion-generated parameters. These results point to a practical route toward continuous-parameter quantum circuit synthesis in native gate sets.