A Reinforcement Learning Environment for Directed Quantum Circuit Synthesis
This work addresses the challenge of automating quantum circuit design for researchers in quantum computing, though it is incremental as it builds on existing reinforcement learning methods applied to a new domain.
The paper tackled the problem of optimizing quantum circuit synthesis by introducing a reinforcement learning environment that designs minimal circuits for specific target states, demonstrating its ability to reliably create minimal circuits for 2-qubit Bell states.
With recent advancements in quantum computing technology, optimizing quantum circuits and ensuring reliable quantum state preparation have become increasingly vital. Traditional methods often demand extensive expertise and manual calculations, posing challenges as quantum circuits grow in qubit- and gate-count. Therefore, harnessing machine learning techniques to handle the growing variety of gate-to-qubit combinations is a promising approach. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive reinforcement learning environment for quantum circuit synthesis, where circuits are constructed utilizing gates from the the Clifford+T gate set to prepare specific target states. Our experiments focus on exploring the relationship between the depth of synthesized quantum circuits and the circuit depths used for target initialization, as well as qubit count. We organize the environment configurations into multiple evaluation levels and include a range of well-known quantum states for benchmarking purposes. We also lay baselines for evaluating the environment using Proximal Policy Optimization. By applying the trained agents to benchmark tests, we demonstrated their ability to reliably design minimal quantum circuits for a selection of 2-qubit Bell states.