Making quantum computing more resilient to noise

QuantumNAS: Noise-Adaptive Search for Robust Quantum Circuits

Researchers at MIT are working to mitigate the noise problem in quantum computing by developing a technique that makes the quantum circuit itself resilient to noise. (Specifically, these are “parameterized” quantum circuits that contain adjustable quantum gates.) The team created a framework that can identify the most robust quantum circuit for a particular computing task and generate a mapping pattern that is tailored to the qubits of a targeted quantum device.

Their framework, called QuantumNAS (Noise Adaptive Search), is much less computationally intensive than other search methods and can identify quantum circuits that improve the accuracy of machine learning and quantum chemistry tasks. When the researchers used their technique to identify quantum circuits for real quantum devices, their circuits outperformed those generated using other methods.

The researchers focused on variational quantum circuits, which use quantum gates with trainable parameters that can learn a machine learning or quantum chemistry task. To design a variational quantum circuit, typically a researcher must either hand-design the circuit or use rule-based methods to design the circuit for a particular task, and then try to find the ideal set of parameters for each quantum gate through an optimization process.

With QuantumNAS, the researchers seek to reduce the overall search and training cost while identifying the quantum circuit that contains the ideal number of parameters and appropriate architecture to maximize accuracy and minimize noise.

To do that, they first design a “SuperCircuit,” which contains all the possible parameterized quantum gates in the design space. That SuperCircuit will be used to generate smaller quantum circuits that can be tested.

They train the SuperCircuit once, and then because all other candidate circuits in the design space are subsets of the SuperCircuit, they inherit corresponding parameters that have already been trained. This reduces the computational overhead of the process.

Once the SuperCircuit has been trained, they use it to search for circuit architectures that meet a targeted objective, in this case high robustness to noise. The process involves searching for quantum circuits and qubit mappings at the same time using what is known as an evolutionary search algorithm.

This algorithm generates some quantum circuit and qubit mapping candidates, then evaluates their accuracy with a noise model or on a real machine. The results are fed back to the algorithm, which selects the best performing parts and uses them to start the process again until it finds the ideal candidates.

To encourage more work in this area, the researchers created an open-source library, called TorchQuantum, that contains information about their projects, tutorials, and tools that can be used by other research groups. (Phys.org)

The paper can be read there.

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