Structure-Agnostic Unitary Learning from Quantum Observable Dynamics with Application to Hamiltonian Identification

Abstract

We present a variational algorithm for learning an unknown quantum unitary from time-series observable measurements, with no structural assumption about the target. The core separation: a hardware-efficient parametrised circuit learns the evolution operator U via observable matching; Hamiltonian identification follows as classical post-processing via matrix logarithm, when the target happens to be exp(-iH*tau). Three experiments establish the method's generality. First, a noiseless proof of correctness with exact gradients (L-BFGS-B) achieves MSE 1.61e-14 and recovers all Hamiltonian coefficients to six decimal places. Second, a gate-learning experiment fits CNOT, iSWAP, and a Haar-random SU(4) element -- none generated by any fixed Hamiltonian -- all to process fidelity 1.000000, confirming the method does not rely on Trotterisation structure. Third, quantum deployment via SPSA-Adam under Qiskit Aer depolarising noise (p1=0.001, p2=0.01, Nshots=1024) recovers all three Ising Hamiltonian terms with errors below 8%. The optimiser, SPSA-Adam, combines SPSA's hardware-efficient two-point gradient estimation with Adam's adaptive moment updates. A four-stage moment-warm curriculum progressively extends the training horizon, converting a global non-convex problem into a sequence of well-posed local ones.