Improving Quantum Circuit Synthesis with Machine Learning
Mathias Weiden Ed Younis Justin Kalloor John Kubiatowicz Costin Iancu
In the Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, finding implementations
of quantum algorithms that minimize 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 $3.7\times$ 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.