{"ID":2891842,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16641","arxiv_id":"2507.16641","title":"Hybrid Reward-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Quantum Circuit Synthesis","abstract":"A reinforcement learning (RL) framework is introduced for the efficient synthesis of quantum circuits that generate specified target quantum states from a fixed initial state, addressing a central challenge in both the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era and future fault-tolerant quantum computing. The approach utilizes tabular Q-learning, based on action sequences, within a discretized quantum state space, to effectively manage the exponential growth of the space dimension. The framework introduces a hybrid reward mechanism, combining a static, domain-informed reward that guides the agent toward the target state with customizable dynamic penalties that discourage inefficient circuit structures such as gate congestion and redundant state revisits. This is a circuit-aware reward, in contrast to the current trend of works on this topic, which are primarily fidelity-based. By leveraging sparse matrix representations and state-space discretization, the method enables practical navigation of high-dimensional environments while minimizing computational overhead. Benchmarking on graph-state preparation tasks for up to seven qubits, we demonstrate that the algorithm consistently discovers minimal-depth circuits with optimized gate counts. Moreover, extending the framework to a universal gate set still yields low depth circuits, highlighting the algorithm robustness and adaptability. The results confirm that this RL-driven approach, with our completely circuit-aware method, efficiently explores the complex quantum state space and synthesizes near-optimal quantum circuits, providing a resource-efficient foundation for quantum circuit optimization.","short_abstract":"A reinforcement learning (RL) framework is introduced for the efficient synthesis of quantum circuits that generate specified target quantum states from a fixed initial state, addressing a central challenge in both the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era and future fault-tolerant quantum computing. The approach...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16641","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16641v3","authors":"[\"Sara Giordano\",\"Kornikar Sen\",\"Miguel A. Martin-Delgado\"]","published":"2025-07-22T14:39:20Z","proceeding":"quant-ph","tasks":"[\"quant-ph\",\"cs.AI\",\"cs.LG\"]","methods":"[\"Reinforcement Learning\"]","has_code":false}
