Current experimental quantum computing devices are limited by noise, mainly originating from entangling gates. If an efficient gate sequence for an operation is unknown, one often employs layered parameterized quantum circuits, especially hardware-efficient ansätze, with fixed entangling layer structures. We demonstrate a reinforcement learning algorithm to improve on these by optimizing the entangling gate sequence in the task of quantum state preparation. This allows us to restrict the required number of CNOT gates while taking the qubit connectivity architecture into account. Recent advancements using reinforcement learning have already demonstrated the power of this technique when optimizing the circuit for a sequence of non-parameterized gates. We extend this approach to parameterized gate sets by incorporating general single-qubit unitaries, thus allowing us to consistently reach higher state preparation fidelities at the same number of CNOT gates compared to a hardware-efficient ansatz.
The parameter-shift rule is an approach to measuring gradients of quantum circuits with respect to their parameters, which does not require ancilla qubits or controlled operations. Here, I discuss applying this approach to a wider range of parameterize quantum gates by decomposing gates into a product of standard gates, each of which is parameter-shift rule differentiable.
The variational quantum eigensolver is a prominent hybrid quantum-classical algorithm expected to impact near-term quantum devices. They are usually based on a circuit ansatz consisting of parameterized single-qubit gates and fixed two-qubit gates. We study the effect of parameterized two-qubit gates in the variational quantum eigensolver. We simulate a variational quantum eigensolver algorithm using fixed and parameterized two-qubit gates in the circuit ansatz and show that the parameterized versions outperform the fixed versions, both when it comes to best energy and reducing outliers, for a…
Mitarai, Negoro, Kitagawa, and Fujii proposed a type of parameterized quantum circuits, for which they gave a way to estimate derivatives wrt the parameters using only changes in the values of the parameters, not in the circuit itself, i.e., no ancillas or controlled operations. Recently, Schuld et al. have extended the results, but they need to revert to ancillas and controlled operations for some cases. In this note, we extend the types of MiNKiF circuits for which derivatives can be computed without ancillas or controlled operations --- at the cost of a larger number of evaluation points. W…
Parameterized quantum circuits play an essential role in the performance of many variational hybrid quantum-classical (HQC) algorithms. One challenge in implementing such algorithms is to choose an effective circuit that well represents the solution space while maintaining a low circuit depth and number of parameters. To characterize and identify expressible, yet compact, parameterized circuits, we propose several descriptors, including measures of expressibility and entangling capability, that can be statistically estimated from classical simulations of parameterized quantum circuits. We comp…
Noisy intermediate scale quantum computers are useful for various tasks such as state preparation and variational quantum algorithms. However, the non-Euclidean quantum geometry of parameterized quantum circuits is detrimental for these applications. Here, we introduce the natural parameterized quantum circuit (NPQC) that can be initialised with a Euclidean quantum geometry. The initial training of variational quantum algorithms is substantially sped up as the gradient is equivalent to the quantum natural gradient. Further, we show how to estimate the parameters of the NPQC by sampling the cir…
Parameterized quantum circuits (PQC, aka, variational quantum circuits) are among the proposals for a computational advantage over classical computation of near-term (not fault tolerant) digital quantum computers. PQCs have to be "trained" -- i.e., the expectation value function has to be maximized over the space of parameters. This paper deals with the number of samples (or "runs" of the quantum computer) which are required to train the PQC, and approaches it from an information theoretic viewpoint. The main take-away is a disparity in the large amount of information contained in a single exa…
Scaling of variational quantum algorithms to large problem sizes requires efficient optimization of random parameterized quantum circuits. For such circuits with uncorrelated parameters, the presence of exponentially vanishing gradients in cost function landscapes is an obstacle to optimization by gradient descent methods. In this work, we prove that reducing the dimensionality of the parameter space by utilizing circuit modules containing spatially or temporally correlated gate layers can allow one to circumvent the vanishing gradient phenomenon. Examples are drawn from random separable circu…
We propose an efficient method for simultaneously optimizing both the structure and parameter values of quantum circuits with only a small computational overhead. Shallow circuits that use structure optimization perform significantly better than circuits that use parameter updates alone, making this method particularly suitable for noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers. We demonstrate the method for optimizing a variational quantum eigensolver for finding the ground states of Lithium Hydride and the Heisenberg model in simulation, and for finding the ground state of Hydrogen gas on the IB…
Parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) are a central component of many variational quantum algorithms, yet there is a lack of understanding of how their parameterization impacts algorithm performance. We initiate this discussion by using principal bundles to geometrically characterize two-qubit PQCs. On the base manifold, we use the Mannoury-Fubini-Study metric to find a simple equation relating the Ricci scalar (geometry) and concurrence (entanglement). By calculating the Ricci scalar during a variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) optimization process, this offers us a new perspective to how a…
Machine learning is seen as a promising application of quantum computation. For near-term noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, parametrized quantum circuits (PQCs) have been proposed as machine learning models due to their robustness and ease of implementation. However, the cost function is normally calculated classically from repeated measurement outcomes, such that it is no longer encoded in a quantum state. This prevents the value from being directly manipulated by a quantum computer. To solve this problem, we give a routine to embed the cost function for machine learning into a…
We study in detail the algebraic structures underlying quantum circuits generated by CNOT gates. Our results allow us to propose polynomial-time heuristics to reduce the number of gates used in a given CNOT circuit and we also give algorithms to optimize this type of circuits in some particular cases. Finally we show how to create some usefull entangled states when a CNOT circuit acts on a fully factorized state.
We propose the generalized controlled X (GCX) gate as the two-qudit elementary gate, and based on Cartan decomposition, we also give the one-qudit elementary gates. Then we discuss the physical implementation of these elementary gates and show that it is feasible with current technology. With these elementary gates many important qudit quantum gates can be synthesized conveniently. We provide efficient methods for the synthesis of various kinds of controlled qudit gates and greatly simplify the synthesis of existing generic multi-valued quantum circuits. Moreover, we generalize the quantum Sha…
In recent years, parameterized quantum circuits have become a major tool to design quantum algorithms for optimization problems. The challenge in fully taking advantage of a given family of parameterized circuits lies in finding a good set of parameters in a non-convex landscape that can grow exponentially to the number of parameters. We introduce a new framework for optimizing parameterized quantum circuits: round SDP solutions to circuit parameters. Within this framework, we propose an algorithm that produces approximate solutions for a quantum optimization problem called Quantum Max Cut. Th…
A Toffoli gate ($C^{n}$-NOT gate) is regarded as an important unitary gate in quantum computation, and is simulated by a quantum circuit composed of $C^{2}$-NOT gates. This paper presents a quantum circuit with a new configuration of $C^{2}$-NOT gates simulating a $C^{2m+1}$-NOT operation under the condition $m=2^{n}$ ($n=1,2,...$). The circuit is composed of units called multi-qubits gates (MQGs), each of which performs $m$ $C^{2}$-NOT operations simultaneously on $3m$ qubits. Simultaneous operations eliminate the need to manipulate qubits individually, as required in conventional quantum cir…
Current structure optimization algorithms optimize the structure of quantum circuit from scratch for each new task of variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) without using any prior experience, which is inefficient and time-consuming. Besides, the number of quantum gates is a hyper-parameter of these algorithms, which is difficult and time-consuming to determine. In this paper, we propose a rapid structure optimization algorithm for VQAs which automatically determines the number of quantum gates and directly generates the optimal structures for new tasks with the meta-trained graph variational a…
In this work, we report on a novel quantum gate approximation algorithm based on the application of parametric two-qubit gates in the synthesis process. The utilization of these parametric two-qubit gates in the circuit design allows us to transform the discrete combinatorial problem of circuit synthesis into an optimization problem over continuous variables. The circuit is then compressed by a sequential removal of two-qubit gates from the design, while the remaining building blocks are continuously adapted to the reduced gate structure by iterated learning cycles. We implemented the develope…
The physical limitations of quantum hardware often require nearest-neighbor qubit structures, in which two-qubit gates are required to construct nearest-neighbor quantum circuits. However, two-qubit gates are considered a major cost of quantum circuits because of their high error rate as compared with single-qubit gates. The controlled-not (CNOT) gate is the typical choice of a two-qubit gate for universal quantum circuit implementation together with the set of single-qubit gates. In this study, we construct a one-dimensional nearest-neighbor circuit of quantum Fourier transform (QFT), which i…
We present a scalable set of universal gates and multiply controlled gates in a qudit basis through a bijective mapping from N qubits to qudits with D = 2^N levels via rotations in U(2). For each of the universal gates (H, CNOT, and T), as well as the NOT gate and multiply-controlled-Z gates, we describe a systematic approach to identifying the set of U(2) rotations required to implement each gate for any qudit of size N and with minimal use of an ancilla level. The qudit gates are analyzed in terms of the total rotation count and gate depth as the system scales with D. We apply the qudit-basi…
In this article the elementary gates for ternary quantum logic circuit are studied. We propose the ternary controlled X (TCX) gate or ternary controlled Z (TCZ) gate as two-qutrit elementary gate, which is universal when assisted by arbitrary one-qutrit gates. It is primitive, efficient and easy to implement. Based on Cartan decomposition, we also give the one-qutrit elementary gates. Then the synthesis of some important ternary gates is investigated and the scheme of physical implementation for these ternary gates is discussed. Finally we extend these elementary gates to more general qudit ca…
Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) have emerged as a powerful class of algorithms that is highly suitable for noisy quantum devices. Therefore, investigating their design has become key in quantum computing research. Previous works have shown that choosing an effective parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) or ansatz for VQAs is crucial to their overall performance, especially on near-term devices. In this paper, we utilize pulse-level access to quantum machines and our understanding of their two-qubit interactions to optimize the design of two-qubit entanglers in a manner suitable for VQAs. O…
In this work, we introduce a new circuit optimization technique to reduce the number of T gates in Clifford+T circuits by treating T gates conjugated by Clifford gates as $\fracπ{4}$-rotations around Pauli operators. The tested benchmarks shows up to $71.43\%$ and an average $42.67\%$ reduction in T-count, both surpass the best performance reported. The worst case complexity of our algorithm is $O(nk^2)$ where $n$ is the number of qubits and $k$ is the number of T gates in the original Clifford+T circuit.
Parameterized circuit instantiation is a common technique encountered in the generation of circuits for a large class of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms. Despite being supported by popular quantum compilation infrastructures such as IBM Qiskit and Google Cirq, instantiation has not been extensively considered in the context of circuit compilation and optimization pipelines. In this work, we describe algorithms to apply instantiation during two common compilation steps: circuit optimization and gate-set transpilation. When placed in a compilation workflow, our circuit optimization algorithm…
The topic area of this paper parameterized quantum circuits (quantum neural networks) which are trained to estimate a given function, specifically the type of circuits proposed by Mitarai et al. (Phys. Rev. A, 2018). The input is encoded into amplitudes of states of qubits. The no-cloning principle of quantum mechanics suggests that there is an advantage in redundantly encoding the input value several times. We follow this suggestion and prove lower bounds on the number of redundant copies for two types of input encoding. We draw conclusions for the architecture design of QNNs.
