Peter V. Coveney

QUANT-PH
Semantic Scholar Profile
h-index6
10papers
61citations
Novelty54%
AI Score53

10 Papers

QUANT-PHApr 29
Optimised Fermion-Qubit Encodings for Quantum Simulation with Reduced Transpiled Circuit Depth

Michael Williams de la Bastida, Thomas M. Bickley, Peter V. Coveney

Simulation of fermionic Hamiltonians with gate-based quantum computers requires the selection of an encoding from fermionic operators to quantum gates, the most widely used being the Jordan-Wigner transform. Many alternative encodings exist, with quantum circuits and simulation results being sensitive to choice of encoding, device connectivity and Hamiltonian characteristics. Non-stochastic optimisation of the ternary tree class of encodings to date has targeted either the device or Hamiltonian. We develop a deterministic method which optimises ternary tree encodings without changing the underlying tree structure. This enables reduction in Pauli-weight without ancillae or additional swap-gate overhead. We demonstrate this method for a variety of encodings, including those which are derived from the qubit connectivity graph of a quantum computer. Numerical results for a suite of standard encoding methods applied to water in the STO-3G basis indicate that our method reduces qDRIFT circuit depths on average by 24.7% and 26.5% for untranspiled and transpiled circuits respectively.

FLU-DYNFeb 17
Uni-Flow: a unified autoregressive-diffusion model for complex multiscale flows

Xiao Xue, Tianyue Yang, Mingyang Gao et al.

Spatiotemporal flows govern diverse phenomena across physics, biology, and engineering, yet modelling their multiscale dynamics remains a central challenge. Despite major advances in physics-informed machine learning, existing approaches struggle to simultaneously maintain long-term temporal evolution and resolve fine-scale structure across chaotic, turbulent, and physiological regimes. Here, we introduce Uni-Flow, a unified autoregressive-diffusion framework that explicitly separates temporal evolution from spatial refinement for modelling complex dynamical systems. The autoregressive component learns low-resolution latent dynamics that preserve large-scale structure and ensure stable long-horizon rollouts, while the diffusion component reconstructs high-resolution physical fields, recovering fine-scale features in a small number of denoising steps. We validate Uni-Flow across canonical benchmarks, including two-dimensional Kolmogorov flow, three-dimensional turbulent channel inflow generation with a quantum-informed autoregressive prior, and patient-specific simulations of aortic coarctation derived from high-fidelity lattice Boltzmann hemodynamic solvers. In the cardiovascular setting, Uni-Flow enables task-level faster than real-time inference of pulsatile hemodynamics, reconstructing high-resolution pressure fields over physiologically relevant time horizons in seconds rather than hours. By transforming high-fidelity hemodynamic simulation from an offline, HPC-bound process into a deployable surrogate, Uni-Flow establishes a pathway to faster-than-real-time modelling of complex multiscale flows, with broad implications for scientific machine learning in flow physics.

AIJul 25, 2025
The wall confronting large language models

Peter V. Coveney, Sauro Succi

We show that the scaling laws which determine the performance of large language models (LLMs) severely limit their ability to improve the uncertainty of their predictions. As a result, raising their reliability to meet the standards of scientific inquiry is intractable by any reasonable measure. We argue that the very mechanism which fuels much of the learning power of LLMs, namely the ability to generate non-Gaussian output distributions from Gaussian input ones, might well be at the roots of their propensity to produce error pileup, ensuing information catastrophes and degenerative AI behaviour. This tension between learning and accuracy is a likely candidate mechanism underlying the observed low values of the scaling components. It is substantially compounded by the deluge of spurious correlations pointed out by Calude and Longo which rapidly increase in any data set merely as a function of its size, regardless of its nature. The fact that a degenerative AI pathway is a very probable feature of the LLM landscape does not mean that it must inevitably arise in all future AI research. Its avoidance, which we also discuss in this paper, necessitates putting a much higher premium on insight and understanding of the structural characteristics of the problems being investigated.

LGSep 1, 2025
Equivariant U-Shaped Neural Operators for the Cahn-Hilliard Phase-Field Model

Xiao Xue, Marco F. P. ten Eikelder, Tianyue Yang et al.

Phase separation in binary mixtures, governed by the Cahn-Hilliard equation, plays a central role in interfacial dynamics across materials science and soft matter. While numerical solvers are accurate, they are often computationally expensive and lack flexibility across varying initial conditions and geometries. Neural operators provide a data-driven alternative by learning solution operators between function spaces, but current architectures often fail to capture multiscale behavior and neglect underlying physical symmetries. Here we show that an equivariant U-shaped neural operator (E-UNO) can learn the evolution of the phase-field variable from short histories of past dynamics, achieving accurate predictions across space and time. The model combines global spectral convolution with a multi-resolution U-shaped architecture and regulates translation equivariance to align with the underlying physics. E-UNO outperforms standard Fourier neural operator and U-shaped neural operator baselines, particularly on fine-scale and high-frequency structures. By encoding symmetry and scale hierarchy, the model generalizes better, requires less training data, and yields physically consistent dynamics. This establishes E-UNO as an efficient surrogate for complex phase-field systems.

QUANT-PHJul 26, 2025
Quantum-Informed Machine Learning for Predicting Spatiotemporal Chaos

Maida Wang, Xiao Xue, Mingyang Gao et al.

We introduce a quantum-informed machine learning (QIML) framework for the long-term dynamical behavior of high-dimensional chaotic systems. The method combines a one-time, offline-trained quantum generative model with a classical autoregressive predictor for spatiotemporal field generation. The quantum model learns a quantum prior (Q-Prior) that guides the representation of small-scale interactions and improves the modeling of fine-scale dynamics. We evaluate QIML on three representative systems: the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, the two-dimensional Kolmogorov flow, and a cross-section of fully developed three-dimensional turbulent channel flow used as a realistic inflow condition. Compared to the classical baseline, QIML yields up to 17.25% improvement in predictive distribution accuracy and a 29.36% improvement in the fidelity of the predicted full energy spectrum. For turbulent channel inflow, the Q-Prior is essential: without it, the model fails to evolve in time, while QIML produces stable, physically consistent forecasts that surpass leading machine learning models for PDEs, including the Fourier Neural Operator and Markov Neural Operator, whose errors diverge. Beyond accuracy, QIML also achieves a memory advantage, compressing multi-megabyte datasets into a kilobyte-scale Q-Prior that captures only the invariant measure needed to guide the classical model, thus circumventing Holevo's bound by avoiding full data reconstruction. Our findings provide a practical and scalable pathway for integrating the advantages brought by quantum devices into large-scale scientific, engineering modeling and simulation.

QUANT-PHDec 22, 2024
A Parameter-Efficient Quantum Anomaly Detection Method on a Superconducting Quantum Processor

Maida Wang, Jinyang Jiang, Peter V. Coveney

Quantum machine learning has gained attention for its potential to address computational challenges. However, whether those algorithms can effectively solve practical problems and outperform their classical counterparts, especially on current quantum hardware, remains a critical question. In this work, we propose a novel quantum machine learning method, called Parameter-Efficient Quantum Anomaly Detection (PEQAD), for practical image anomaly detection, which aims to achieve both parameter efficiency and superior accuracy compared to classical models. Emulation results indicate that PEQAD demonstrates favourable recognition capabilities compared to classical baselines, achieving an average accuracy of over 90% on benchmarks with significantly fewer trainable parameters. Theoretical analysis confirms that PEQAD has a comparable expressivity to classical counterparts while requiring only a fraction of the parameters. Furthermore, we demonstrate the first implementation of a quantum anomaly detection method for general image datasets on a superconducting quantum processor. Specifically, we achieve an accuracy of over 80% with only 16 parameters on the device, providing initial evidence of PEQAD's practical viability in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum era and highlighting its significant reduction in parameter requirements.

LGSep 26, 2025
Fast-Forward Lattice Boltzmann: Learning Kinetic Behaviour with Physics-Informed Neural Operators

Xiao Xue, Marco F. P. ten Eikelder, Mingyang Gao et al.

The lattice Boltzmann equation (LBE), rooted in kinetic theory, provides a powerful framework for capturing complex flow behaviour by describing the evolution of single-particle distribution functions (PDFs). Despite its success, solving the LBE numerically remains computationally intensive due to strict time-step restrictions imposed by collision kernels. Here, we introduce a physics-informed neural operator framework for the LBE that enables prediction over large time horizons without step-by-step integration, effectively bypassing the need to explicitly solve the collision kernel. We incorporate intrinsic moment-matching constraints of the LBE, along with global equivariance of the full distribution field, enabling the model to capture the complex dynamics of the underlying kinetic system. Our framework is discretization-invariant, enabling models trained on coarse lattices to generalise to finer ones (kinetic super-resolution). In addition, it is agnostic to the specific form of the underlying collision model, which makes it naturally applicable across different kinetic datasets regardless of the governing dynamics. Our results demonstrate robustness across complex flow scenarios, including von Karman vortex shedding, ligament breakup, and bubble adhesion. This establishes a new data-driven pathway for modelling kinetic systems.

DCMar 4, 2021
Pandemic Drugs at Pandemic Speed: Infrastructure for Accelerating COVID-19 Drug Discovery with Hybrid Machine Learning- and Physics-based Simulations on High Performance Computers

Agastya P. Bhati, Shunzhou Wan, Dario Alfè et al.

The race to meet the challenges of the global pandemic has served as a reminder that the existing drug discovery process is expensive, inefficient and slow. There is a major bottleneck screening the vast number of potential small molecules to shortlist lead compounds for antiviral drug development. New opportunities to accelerate drug discovery lie at the interface between machine learning methods, in this case developed for linear accelerators, and physics-based methods. The two in silico methods, each have their own advantages and limitations which, interestingly, complement each other. Here, we present an innovative infrastructural development that combines both approaches to accelerate drug discovery. The scale of the potential resulting workflow is such that it is dependent on supercomputing to achieve extremely high throughput. We have demonstrated the viability of this workflow for the study of inhibitors for four COVID-19 target proteins and our ability to perform the required large-scale calculations to identify lead antiviral compounds through repurposing on a variety of supercomputers.

COMP-PHJun 27, 2019
HEMELB Acceleration and Visualization for Cerebral Aneurysms

Sahar Soheilian Esfahani, Xiaojun Zhai, Minsi Chen et al.

A weakness in the wall of a cerebral artery causing a dilation or ballooning of the blood vessel is known as a cerebral aneurysm. Optimal treatment requires fast and accurate diagnosis of the aneurysm. HemeLB is a fluid dynamics solver for complex geometries developed to provide neurosurgeons with information related to the flow of blood in and around aneurysms. On a cost efficient platform, HemeLB could be employed in hospitals to provide surgeons with the simulation results in real-time. In this work, we developed an improved version of HemeLB for GPU implementation and result visualization. A visualization platform for smooth interaction with end users is also presented. Finally, a comprehensive evaluation of this implementation is reported. The results demonstrate that the proposed implementation achieves a maximum performance of 15,168,964 site updates per second, and is capable of speeding up HemeLB for deployment in hospitals and clinical investigations.

DCOct 16, 2012
Coalesced communication: a design pattern for complex parallel scientific software

Hywel B. Carver, Derek Groen, James Hetherington et al.

We present a new design pattern for high-performance parallel scientific software, named coalesced communication. This pattern allows for a structured way to improve the communication performance through coalescence of multiple communication needs using two communication management components. We apply the design pattern to several simulations of a lattice-Boltzmann blood flow solver with streaming visualisation which engenders a reduction in the communication overhead of approximately 40%.