arXiv subjects

Zhiding Liang

Publications and source records attributed to Zhiding Liang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

DC-MBQC: A Distributed Compilation Framework for Measurement-Based Quantum Computing

Distributed quantum computing (DQC) is a promising technique for scaling up quantum systems. While significant progress has been made in DQC for quantum circuit models, there exists much less research on DQC for measurement-based quantum computing (MBQC), which is a universal quantum computing model that is essentially different from the circuit model and particularly well-suited to photonic quantum platforms. In this paper, we propose DC-MBQC, the first distributed quantum compilation framework tailored for MBQC. We identify and address two key challenges in enabling DQC for MBQC. First, for task allocation among quantum processing units (QPUs), we develop an adaptive graph partitioning algorithm that preserves the structure of the graph state while balancing the workload across QPUs. Second, for inter-QPU communication, we introduce the layer scheduling problem and propose an algorithm to solve it. Regrading realistic hardware requirements, we optimize the execution time of running quantum programs and the corresponding required photon lifetime to avoid fatal failures caused by photon loss. Our experiments demonstrate a $7.46\times$ improvement on required photon lifetime and $6.82\times$ speedup with 8 fully-connected QPUs, which further confirm the advantage of distributed quantum computing in photonic systems. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/qfcwj/DC-MBQC.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Quantum-machine-assisted Drug Discovery

Drug discovery is lengthy and expensive, with traditional computer-aided design facing limits. This paper examines integrating quantum computing across the drug development cycle to accelerate and enhance workflows and rigorous decision-making. It highlights quantum approaches for molecular simulation, drug-target interaction prediction, and optimizing clinical trials. Leveraging quantum capabilities could accelerate timelines and costs for bringing therapies to market, improving efficiency and ultimately benefiting public health.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

A Compilation Framework for Quantum Circuits with Mid-Circuit Measurement Error Awareness

Mid-circuit measurement (MCM) provides the capability for qubit reuse and dynamic control in quantum processors, enabling more resource-efficient algorithms and supporting error-correction procedures. However, MCM introduces several sources of error, including measurement-induced crosstalk, idling-qubit decoherence, and reset infidelity, and these errors exhibit pronounced qubit-dependent variability within a single device. Since existing compilers such as the Qiskit-compiler and QR-Map (the state-of-art qubit reuse compiler) do not account for this variability, circuits with frequent MCM operations often experience substantial fidelity loss. In thie paper, we propose MERA, a compilation framework that performs MCM-error-aware layout, routing, and scheduling. MERA leverages lightweight profiling to obtain a stable per-qubit MCM error distribution, which it uses to guide error-aware qubit mapping and SWAP insertions. To further mitigate MCM-related decoherence and crosstalk, MERA augments as-late-as-possible scheduling with context-aware dynamic decoupling. Evaluated on 27 benchmark circuits, MERA achieves 24.94% -- 52.00% fidelity improvement over the Qiskit compiler (optimization level 3) without introducing additional overhead. On QR-Map-generated circuits, it improves fidelity by 29.26% on average and up to 122.58% in the best case, demonstrating its effectiveness for dynamic circuits dominated by MCM operations.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

TITAN: A Trajectory-Informed Technique for Adaptive Parameter Freezing in Large-Scale VQE

Variational quantum Eigensolver (VQE) is a leading candidate for harnessing quantum computers to advance quantum chemistry and materials simulations, yet its training efficiency deteriorates rapidly for large Hamiltonians. Two issues underlie this bottleneck: (i) the no-cloning theorem imposes a linear growth in circuit evaluations with the number of parameters per gradient step; and (ii) deeper circuits encounter barren plateaus (BPs), leading to exponentially increasing measurement overheads. To address these challenges, here we propose a deep learning framework, dubbed Titan, which identifies and freezes inactive parameters of a given ansatze at initialization for a specific class of Hamiltonians, reducing the optimization overhead without sacrificing accuracy. The motivation of Titan starts with our empirical findings that a subset of parameters consistently has a negligible influence on training dynamics. Its design combines a theoretically grounded data construction strategy, ensuring each training example is informative and BP-resilient, with an adaptive neural architecture that generalizes across ansatze of varying sizes. Across benchmark transverse-field Ising models, Heisenberg models, and multiple molecule systems up to 30 qubits, Titan achieves up to 3 times faster convergence and 40% to 60% fewer circuit evaluations than state-of-the-art baselines, while matching or surpassing their estimation accuracy. By proactively trimming parameter space, Titan lowers hardware demands and offers a scalable path toward utilizing VQE to advance practical quantum chemistry and materials science.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Can Classical Initialization Help Variational Quantum Circuits Escape the Barren Plateau?

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) have emerged as a leading paradigm in near-term quantum computing, yet their performance can be hindered by the so-called barren plateau problem, where gradients vanish exponentially with system size or circuit depth. While most existing VQA research employs simple Gaussian or zero-initialization schemes, classical deep learning has long benefited from sophisticated weight initialization strategies such as Xavier, He, and orthogonal initialization to improve gradient flow and expedite convergence. In this work, we systematically investigate whether these classical methods can mitigate barren plateaus in quantum circuits. We first review each initialization's theoretical grounding and outline how to adapt the notions from neural networks to VQAs. We then conduct extensive numerical experiments on various circuit architectures and optimization tasks. Our findings indicate that while the initial heuristics, inspired by classical initialization, yield moderate improvements in certain experiments, their overall benefits remain marginal. By outlining a preliminary exploration plan in this paper, we aim to offer the research community a broader perspective and accessible demonstrations. Furthermore, we propose future research directions that may be further refined by leveraging the insights gained from this work.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Breaking Through Barren Plateaus: Reinforcement Learning Initializations for Deep Variational Quantum Circuits

Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) have gained prominence as a viable framework for exploiting near-term quantum devices in applications ranging from optimization and chemistry simulation to machine learning. However, the effectiveness of VQAs is often constrained by the so-called barren plateau problem, wherein gradients diminish exponentially as system size or circuit depth increases, thereby hindering training. In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based initialization strategy to alleviate the barren plateau issue by reshaping the initial parameter landscape to avoid regions prone to vanishing gradients. In particular, we explore several RL algorithms (Deterministic Policy Gradient, Soft Actor-Critic, and Proximal Policy Optimization, etc.) to generate the circuit parameters (treated as actions) that minimize the VQAs cost function before standard gradient-based optimization. By pre-training with RL in this manner, subsequent optimization using methods such as gradient descent or Adam proceeds from a more favorable initial state. Extensive numerical experiments under various noise conditions and tasks consistently demonstrate that the RL-based initialization method significantly enhances both convergence speed and final solution quality. Moreover, comparisons among different RL algorithms highlight that multiple approaches can achieve comparable performance gains, underscoring the flexibility and robustness of our method. These findings shed light on a promising avenue for integrating machine learning techniques into quantum algorithm design, offering insights into how RL-driven parameter initialization can accelerate the scalability and practical deployment of VQAs. Opening up a promising path for the research community in machine learning for quantum, especially barren plateau problems in VQAs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Hardware-aware Compilation for Chip-to-Chip Coupler-Connected Modular Quantum Systems

As quantum processors scale, monolithic architectures face growing challenges due to limited qubit density, heterogeneous error profiles, and restricted connectivity. Modular quantum systems, enabled by chip-to-chip coupler-connected modular architectures, provide a scalable alternative. However, existing quantum compilers fail to accommodate this new architecture. We introduce CCMap, a circuit-compiler co-design framework that enhances existing quantum compilers with system-level coordination across modular chips. It leverages calibration data and introduces a coupler-aligned and noise-aware cost metric to evaluate circuit compilation. CCMap integrates with existing compilers by partitioning circuits into subcircuits compiled on individual chips, followed by a global mapping step to minimize the total cost. We evaluated CCMap on IBM-Q noisy emulators using real hardware calibrations across various coupler-connected topologies. Results show that CCMap improves circuit fidelity by up to 21.9%, representing a 30% increase, and reduces compilation cost by up to 58.6% over state-of-the-art baselines. These findings highlight CCMap's potential to enable scalable, high-fidelity execution in coupler-connected modular quantum systems.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Introduction to Quantum Machine Learning and Quantum Architecture Search

Recent advancements in quantum computing (QC) and machine learning (ML) have fueled significant research efforts aimed at integrating these two transformative technologies. Quantum machine learning (QML), an emerging interdisciplinary field, leverages quantum principles to enhance the performance of ML algorithms. Concurrently, the exploration of systematic and automated approaches for designing high-performance quantum circuit architectures for QML tasks has gained prominence, as these methods empower researchers outside the quantum computing domain to effectively utilize quantum-enhanced tools. This tutorial will provide an in-depth overview of recent breakthroughs in both areas, highlighting their potential to expand the application landscape of QML across diverse fields.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Space-time Peer-to-Peer Distribution of Multi-party Entanglement for Any Quantum Network

Graph states are a class of important multiparty entangled states, of which bell pairs are the special case. Realizing a robust and fast distribution of arbitrary graph states in the downstream layer of the quantum network can be essential for further large-scale quantum networks. We propose a novel quantum network protocol called P2PGSD inspired by the classical Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network to efficiently implement the general graph state distribution in the network layer, which demonstrates advantages in resource efficiency and scalability over existing methods for sparse graph states. An explicit mathematical model for a general graph state distribution problem has also been constructed, above which the intractability for a wide class of resource minimization problems is proved and the optimality of the existing algorithms is discussed. In addition, we leverage the spacetime quantum network inspired by the symmetry from relativity for memory management in network problems and used it to improve our proposed algorithm. The advantages of our protocols are confirmed by numerical simulations showing an improvement of up to 50% for general sparse graph states, paving the way for a resource-efficient multiparty entanglement distribution across any network topology.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

A Scalable and Robust Compilation Framework for Emitter-Photonic Graph State

Quantum graph states are critical resources for various quantum algorithms, and also determine essential interconnections in distributed quantum computing. There are two schemes for generating graph states probabilistic scheme and deterministic scheme. While the all-photonic probabilistic scheme has garnered significant attention, the emitter-photonic deterministic scheme has been proved to be more scalable and feasible across several hardware platforms. This paper studies the GraphState-to-Circuit compilation problem in the context of the deterministic scheme. Previous research has primarily focused on optimizing individual circuit parameters, often neglecting the characteristics of quantum hardware, which results in impractical implementations. Additionally, existing algorithms lack scalability for larger graph sizes. To bridge these gaps, we propose a novel compilation framework that partitions the target graph state into subgraphs, compiles them individually, and subsequently combines and schedules the circuits to maximize emitter resource utilization. Furthermore, we incorporate local complementation to transform graph states and minimize entanglement overhead. Evaluation of our framework on various graph types demonstrates significant reductions in CNOT gates and circuit duration, up to 52% and 56%. Moreover, it enhances the suppression of photon loss, achieving improvements of up to x1.9.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2025

Intuit: Explain Quantum Computing Concepts via AR-based Analogy

Quantum computing has shown great potential to revolutionize traditional computing and can provide an exponential speedup for a wide range of possible applications, attracting various stakeholders. However, understanding fundamental quantum computing concepts remains a significant challenge for novices because of their abstract and counterintuitive nature. Thus, we propose an analogy-based characterization framework to construct the mental mapping between quantum computing concepts and daily objects, informed by in-depth expert interviews and a literature review, covering key quantum concepts and characteristics like number of qubits, output state duality, quantum concept type, and probability quantification. Then, we developed an AR-based prototype system, Intuit, using situated analytics to explain quantum concepts through daily objects and phenomena (e.g., rotating coins, paper cutters). We thoroughly evaluated our approach through in-depth user and expert interviews. The Results demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of Intuit in helping learners understand abstract concepts in an intuitive and engaging manner.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Quantum-Inspired Fidelity-based Divergence

Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence is a fundamental measure of the dissimilarity between two probability distributions, but it can become unstable in high-dimensional settings due to its sensitivity to mismatches in distributional support. To address robustness limitations, we propose a novel Quantum-Inspired Fidelity-based Divergence (QIF), leveraging quantum information principles yet efficiently computable on classical hardware. Compared to KL divergence, QIF demonstrates improved numerical stability under partial or near-disjoint support conditions, thereby reducing the need for extensive regularization in specific scenarios. Moreover, QIF admits well-defined theoretical bounds and continuous similarity measures. Building on this, we introduce a novel regularization method, QR-Drop, which utilizes QIF to improve generalization in machine learning models. Empirical results show that QR-Drop effectively mitigates overfitting and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

QuEst: Graph Transformer for Quantum Circuit Reliability Estimation

Among different quantum algorithms, PQC for QML show promises on near-term devices. To facilitate the QML and PQC research, a recent python library called TorchQuantum has been released. It can construct, simulate, and train PQC for machine learning tasks with high speed and convenient debugging supports. Besides quantum for ML, we want to raise the community's attention on the reversed direction: ML for quantum. Specifically, the TorchQuantum library also supports using data-driven ML models to solve problems in quantum system research, such as predicting the impact of quantum noise on circuit fidelity and improving the quantum circuit compilation efficiency. This paper presents a case study of the ML for quantum part. Since estimating the noise impact on circuit reliability is an essential step toward understanding and mitigating noise, we propose to leverage classical ML to predict noise impact on circuit fidelity. Inspired by the natural graph representation of quantum circuits, we propose to leverage a graph transformer model to predict the noisy circuit fidelity. We firstly collect a large dataset with a variety of quantum circuits and obtain their fidelity on noisy simulators and real machines. Then we embed each circuit into a graph with gate and noise properties as node features, and adopt a graph transformer to predict the fidelity. Evaluated on 5 thousand random and algorithm circuits, the graph transformer predictor can provide accurate fidelity estimation with RMSE error 0.04 and outperform a simple neural network-based model by 0.02 on average. It can achieve 0.99 and 0.95 R$^2$ scores for random and algorithm circuits, respectively. Compared with circuit simulators, the predictor has over 200X speedup for estimating the fidelity.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Efficient Circuit Cutting and Scheduling in a Multi-Node Quantum System with Dynamic EPR Pairs

Despite advancements, current quantum hardware faces significant challenges, including limited qubit counts and high susceptibility to noise, which hinder the execution of large, complex algorithms. To address these limitations, multi-node quantum systems and quantum circuit cutting techniques partition large circuits into smaller subcircuits that can be executed on individual quantum machines and then reconstructed using classical resources. However, these methods introduce new challenges, such as the large overhead from subcircuit reconstruction and additional noise from entangled EPR pairs, especially in multi-node quantum systems. In this paper, we propose the Efficient Circuit Cutting and Scheduling (EC2S) system, which integrates EPR pairs with circuit cutting to address these issues. EC2S improves system performance by transitioning from logical to physical EPR pairs and further reduces computational overhead by minimizing the number of subcircuits during the reconstruction phase. \sol~ is implemented using Qiskit and evaluated on both real quantum hardware and various emulators. Compared to the state-of-the-art Qiskit-Addon-Cut, EC2S achieves significant improvements in fidelity, up to 16.7\%, and reduces system-wide expenditure by up to 99.5\%.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

Qsco: A Quantum Scoring Module for Open-set Supervised Anomaly Detection

Open set anomaly detection (OSAD) is a crucial task that aims to identify abnormal patterns or behaviors in data sets, especially when the anomalies observed during training do not represent all possible classes of anomalies. The recent advances in quantum computing in handling complex data structures and improving machine learning models herald a paradigm shift in anomaly detection methodologies. This study proposes a Quantum Scoring Module (Qsco), embedding quantum variational circuits into neural networks to enhance the model's processing capabilities in handling uncertainty and unlabeled data. Extensive experiments conducted across eight real-world anomaly detection datasets demonstrate our model's superior performance in detecting anomalies across varied settings and reveal that integrating quantum simulators does not result in prohibitive time complexities. Our study validates the feasibility of quantum-enhanced anomaly detection methods in practical applications.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

CaliScalpel: In-Situ and Fine-Grained Qubit Calibration Integrated with Surface Code Quantum Error Correction

Quantum Error Correction (QEC) is a cornerstone of fault-tolerant, large-scale quantum computing. However, qubit error drift significantly degrades QEC performance over time, necessitating periodic calibration. Traditional calibration methods disrupt quantum states, requiring system downtime and making in situ calibration infeasible. We present CaliScalpel, an innovative framework for in situ calibration in surface codes. The core idea behind CaliScalpel is leveraging code deformation to isolate qubits undergoing calibration from logical patches. This allows calibration to proceed concurrently with computation, while code enlargement maintains error correction capabilities with minimal qubit overhead. Additionally, CaliScalpel incorporates optimized calibration schedules derived from detailed device characterization, effectively minimizing physical error rates. Our results show that CaliScalpel achieves concurrent calibration and computation with modest qubit overhead and negligible execution time impact, marking a significant step toward practical in situ calibration in surface-code-based quantum computing systems.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Leveraging Hardware Power through Optimal Pulse Profiling for Each Qubit Pair

In the scaling development of quantum computers, the calibration process emerges as a critical challenge. Existing calibration methods, utilizing the same pulse waveform for two-qubit gates across the device, overlook hardware differences among physical qubits and lack efficient parallel calibration. In this paper, we enlarge the pulse candidates for two-qubit gates to three pulse waveforms, and introduce a fine-grained calibration protocol. In the calibration protocol, three policies are proposed to profile each qubit pair with its optimal pulse waveform. Afterwards, calibration subgraphs are introduced to enable parallel calibraton through identifying compatible calibration operations. The protocol is validated on real machine with up to 127 qubits. Real-machine experiments demonstrates a minimum gate error of 0.001 with a median error of 0.006 which is 1.84x reduction compared to default pulse waveform provided by IBM. On device level, a double fold increase in quantum volume as well as 2.3x reduction in error per layered gate are achieved. The proposed protocol leverages the potential current hardware and could server as an important step toward fault-tolerant quantum computing.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

ECDQC: Efficient Compilation for Distributed Quantum Computing with Linear Layout

In this paper, we propose an efficient compilation method for distributed quantum computing (DQC) using the Linear Nearest Neighbor (LNN) architecture. By exploiting the LNN topology's symmetry, we optimize quantum circuit compilation for High Local Connectivity, Sparse Full Connectivity (HLC-SFC) algorithms like Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) and Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT). We also utilize dangling qubits to minimize non-local interactions and reduce SWAP gates. Our approach significantly decreases compilation time, gate count, and circuit depth, improving scalability and robustness for large-scale quantum computations.

quant-ph↗