Approximation of Quantum States Using Decision Diagrams

Realizing the promised advantage of quantum computers over classical computers requires both physical devices and corresponding methods for the design, verification and analysis of quantum circuits. In this regard, decision diagrams have proven themselves to be an indispensable tool due to their capability to represent both quantum states and unitaries (circuits) compactly. Nonetheless, recent results show that decision diagrams can grow to exponential size even for the ubiquitous stabilizer states, which are generated by Clifford circuits. Since Clifford circuits can be efficiently simulated classically, this is surprising. Moreover, since Clifford circuits play a crucial role in many quantum computing applications, from networking, to error correction, this limitation forms a major obstacle for using decision diagrams for the design, verification and analysis of quantum circuits. The recently proposed Local Invertible Map Decision Diagram (LIMDD) solves this problem by combining the strengths of decision diagrams and the stabilizer formalism that enables efficient simulation of Clifford circuits. However, LIMDDs have only been introduced on paper thus far and have not been implemented yet—preventing an investigation of their practical capabilities through experiments. In this work, we present the first implementation of LIMDDs for quantum circuit simulation. A case study confirms the improved performance in both worlds for the Quantum Fourier Transform applied to a stabilizer state. The resulting package is available under a free license at https://github.com/cda-tum/ddsim/tree/limdd .

This special issue of the VLSI DESIGN: an International Journal of Custom-Chip Design, Simulation and Testing is devoted to spectral techniques, new types of decision trees and diagrams, their applications, efficient ways of their calculation and mutual relations between spectral techniques and classical decision diagrams. Manipulations and calculations with discrete functions are fundamental tasks in many areas of Computer Science and Engineering. Many problems in digital system design, simulation and testing can be expressed as a sequence of operations on discrete functions. The performance of Computer-Aided Design systems used in solving various problems in this area strongly depends on the efficiency of representations of discrete functions. Decision Diagrams (DDs) have proved very convenient data structure for discrete function representations, permitting manipulations and calculations with large functions efficiently in terms of time and space. In many applications, as for example those involving large matrices, conventional algorithms are significantly improved by using DDs. In logic design, such applications relate to basic problems of the design, verification, simulation and testing logical networks. Besides Boolean functions, some other types of discrete representations, such as multi-valued functions, cube sets, EXOR-based spectral and probabilistic formulas have to be dealt with. Hence the numbers of different decision trees and diagrams have been introduced for these various applications and representations. The spectral or polynomial representation of Boolean function is obtained by expressing it in terms of an orthogonal basis. The most popular basis is formed by discrete Walsh functions. Note that the spectral and the polynomial representation of a Boolean function are equivalent. The discrete orthogonal functions are referred to as the basis functions when the spectral or abstract harmonic terminology is used and as monomials when the polynomial terminology is used. Such polynomial representations have extensive applications in coding theory and cryptography as well as design of nonlinear filters. Spectral techniques based on Walsh, Haar, Arithmetic and Reed–Muller transforms have been used in digital logic design for more than 30 years. These techniques have been used for Boolean function classification, disjoint decomposition, identification of symmetries, parallel and serial linear decomposition, spectral translation synthesis (extraction of linear preand post-filters), multiplexer synthesis, threshold logic synthesis, state assignment and testing, and evaluation of logic complexity. The renewed interest in applications of spectral methods in design of VLSI digital circuits is caused by their excellent design for testability properties and in their efficiency in Boolean mapping problems. Furthermore, the practical applicability of these techniques was greatly improved with the development of efficient methods that allow calculating and operating on spectra of Boolean functions directly from reduced representations of such functions in the form of arrays of cubes or decision diagrams. Following from these recent developments, techniques have been presented for efficient spectral translation to decompose a circuit into a cascade of two sub circuits: linear block composed of EXOR gates fed by the primary input of the overall circuit. Such linear decomposition drastically simplifies the synthesis task. The choice of suitable linear transformation is based on a complexity measure assigned to each Boolean function that is heuristically related to the complexity of the final circuit implementation. To avoid the experimental costs of computing the Walsh transform, Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) based techniques are used. Recently the idea of linear transformations is applied to decision diagrams. By combining powerful spectral linear techniques with variable reordering techniques, it is possible to synthesize large Boolean functions with standard Computer-Aided Design tools that fail otherwise. The areas addressed by this special issue span spectral transforms, their applications and efficient calculation methods through decision diagrams. New spectral decision diagrams are also emerging that support larger data structures allowing more complex discrete representations to be implemented that was previously impossible.

Loading classical data into quantum registers is one of the most important primitives of quantum computing. While the complexity of preparing a generic quantum state is exponential in the number of qubits, in many practical tasks the state to prepare has a certain structure that allows for faster preparation. In this paper, we consider quantum states that can be efficiently represented by (reduced) decision diagrams, a versatile data structure for the representation and analysis of Boolean functions. We design an algorithm that utilizes the structure of decision diagrams to prepare their associated quantum states. Our algorithm has a circuit complexity that is linear in the number of paths in the decision diagram. Numerical experiments show that our algorithm reduces the circuit complexity by up to 31.85% compared to the state-of-the-art algorithm, when preparing generic $n$-qubit states with ${n}^{3}$ nonzero amplitudes. Additionally, for states with sparse decision diagrams, including the initial state of the quantum Byzantine agreement protocol, our algorithm reduces the number of controlled-nots by 86.61--99.9%.

Kirkwood-Dirac classical pure states

An ordered binary decision diagram (OBDD) is a directed acyclic graph that represents a Boolean function. Since OBDDs have many nice properties as data structures, they have been extensively studied for decades in both theoretical and practical fields, such as VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) design, formal verification, machine learning, and combinatorial problems. Arguably, the most crucial problem in using OBDDs is that they may vary exponentially in size depending on their variable ordering (i.e., the order in which the variables are to be read) when they represent the same function. Indeed, it is NP hard to find an optimal variable ordering that minimizes an OBDD for a given function. Friedman and Supowit provided a clever deterministic algorithm with time/space complexity O^∗(3ⁿ), where n is the number of variables of the function, which is much better than the trivial brute-force bound O^∗(n!2ⁿ). This paper shows that a further speedup is possible with quantum computers by presenting a quantum algorithm that produces a minimum OBDD together with the corresponding variable ordering in O^∗(2.77286ⁿ) time and space with an exponentially small error probability. Moreover, this algorithm can be adapted to constructing other minimum decision diagrams such as zero-suppressed BDDs.

Computer science will be radically transformed if ongoing efforts to build large-scale quantum computers eventually succeed and if the properties of these computers meet optimistic expectations. Nevertheless, computer scientists still lack a thorough understanding of the power of quantum computing, and it is not always clear how best to utilize the power that is understood. This dilemma exists because quantum algorithms are difficult to grasp and even more difficult to write. Despite large-scale international efforts, only a few important quantum algorithms are documented, leaving many essential questions about the potential of quantum algorithms unanswered. These unsolved problems are ideal challenges for the application of automatic programming technologies. Genetic programming techniques, in particular, have already produced several new quantum algorithms and it is reasonable to expect further discoveries in the future. These methods will help researchers to discover how additional practical problems can be solved using quantum computers, and they will also help to guide theoretical work on both the power and limits of quantum computing. This tutorial will provide an introduction to quantum computing and an introduction to the use of evolutionary computation for automatic quantum computer programming. No background in physics or in evolutionary computation will be assumed. While the primary focus of the tutorial will be on general concepts, specific results will also be presented, including human-competitive results produced by genetic programming. Follow-up material is available from the presenter's book, Automatic Quantum Computer Programming: A Genetic Programming Approach, published by Springer and Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Quantum computing is emerging as a powerful computational paradigm capable of solving infeasible problems for classical computers. This review explores the intersection of quantum computing and artificial intelligence (AI), focusing on how quantum algorithms can enhance AI applications. The purpose of this review is to provide a comprehensive analysis of current advancements in quantum machine learning (QML), quantum optimization, and quantum neural networks, highlighting their implications for data processing, cryptography, and decision-making systems. The scope of the literature includes peer-reviewed articles, conference papers, and technical reports from 2020 to 2025, focusing on quantum algorithms, applications in AI, and hardware limitations. Key findings indicate that quantum computing can significantly accelerate data processing tasks, optimize complex problem-solving techniques, and improve the efficiency of AI models. However, challenges such as quantum noise, error correction, and hardware scalability remain substantial barriers to widespread adoption. This review concludes with discussing future research directions, including hybrid quantum-classical systems and advanced quantum error correction methods. This study serves as a foundational reference for researchers and practitioners aiming to leverage quantum computing for AI-driven applications. 3. Keywords Quantum Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Machine Learning, Quantum Algorithms, Data Processing, Optimization, Quantum Neural Networks

<p indent="0mm">Recently, the achievement, entitled “lifetime enhancement for a logic qubit by bosonic encoding error correction”, has been selected as one of “The Ten Major Advances in Chinese Science 2023”. Here, we will introduce briefly the importance of this work. It is known that quantum states are fragile due to decoherence induced by environment. Error will happen on a qubit, resulting in continuously changes of the parameters for this qubit, such as amplitude and phase parameters. The aim of quantum error correction is to amend those errors by using various quantum error correction codes, in which a logic qubit can be represented by several physical qubits. It should be noted that the quantum error correction can be realized by correcting a discrete set of errors, such as bit-flip error, phase-flip error or both of them. On the other hand, types of errors occurred depend on specific platforms of quantum computation. For example, photon loss is more inclined to occur in photonic systems. In this case, the approach of bosonic encoding of quantum error correction is more efficient. The work “lifetime enhancement for a logic qubit by bosonic encoding error correction” is for such a scenario. The challenge of quantum error correction is that operation itself is not perfect which may incur new errors. So it is actually difficult to demonstrate that we can benefit from quantum error correction. The achievement of lifetime enhancement by bosonic encoding error correction succeeds in beating this break-even point. The experiments are performed by circuit quantum electrodynamics on a superconducting processor with a qubit and a coupled resonate cavity. The logic qubit is realized by the bosonic mode of the cavity, while the superconducting qubit plays the role of the ancillary qubit in error correction. The initial states are prepared by the superconducting qubit, and are transferred to the logic qubit in the cavity. Then the error correction can be performed based on detection of photon loss by the superconducting qubit. The results show that the lifetime of the logic qubit increases from <sc>694 μs</sc> to <sc>805 μs</sc> with 16% enhancement. Besides high quality devices, the success of this experiment depends on the feedback control to detect and correct the error of photon loss in a short time. The result of beating the break-even point of bosonic encoding error correction is for one logic qubit. In the near future, it is hopeful to implement logic gates, such as single-qubit rotation gate and two-qubit gate, on a couple of logic qubits by bosonic encoding. The importance of the results will depend on whether higher fidelity can be achieved compared with those of gates with physical qubits. In this way, the advantage of the logic qubits for quantum computation is presented. It will be significant that the approach of bosonic encoding with a superconducting processor is scalable to hundreds of logic qubits, which may take a few years to realize. Our aim is to realize a fault-tolerant universal quantum computer based on a large quantity of high-precision logic qubits. The work “lifetime enhancement for a logic qubit by bosonic encoding error correction” is an important step toward this aim.

In this paper we establish a unique factorization theorem for pure quantum states expressed in computational basis. We show that there always exists unique factorization for any given N-qubit pure quantum state in terms of the tensor product of non-factorable or ``prime'' pure quantum states. This result is based on a simple criterion: Given N-qubit pure quantum state in computational basis can be factorized as the tensor product of an m-qubit pure quantum state and an n-qubit pure quantum state, where (m + n) = N, if and only if the rank of the certain associated matrix is equal to one. This simple criterion leads to a factorization algorithm which when applied to an N-qubit pure quantum state factorizes that state into the tensor product of non-factorable or ``prime'' pure quantum states. This paper shows that for any given N-qubit pure quantum state the said factorization always ``exists'' and is ``unique''. We demonstrated our work here on a computational basis. PACS Number: 03.67.Mn, 03.65.Ca, 03.65.Ud

The Eastin-Knill theorem is a central result of quantum error correction theory and states that a quantum code cannot correct errors exactly, possess continuous symmetries, and implement a universal set of gates transversely. As a way to circumvent this result, there are several approaches in which one gives up on either exact error correction or continuous symmetries. In this context, it is common to employ a complementary measure of fidelity as a way to quantify quantum state distinguishability and benchmark approximations in error correction. Despite having useful properties, evaluating fidelity measures stands as a challenging task for quantum states with a large number of entangled qubits. With that in mind, we address two distance measures based on the sub- and superfidelities as a way to bound error approximations, which in turn require a lower computational cost. We model the lack of exact error correction to be equivalent to the action of a single dephasing channel, evaluate the proposed fidelity-based distances both analytically and numerically, and obtain a closed-form expression for a general $N$-qubit quantum state. We illustrate our bounds with two paradigmatic examples, an $N$-qubit mixed GHZ state and an $N$-qubit mixed $W$ state.

Quantum error correction is a set of methods to protect quantum information—that is, quantum states—from unwanted environmental interactions (decoherence) and other forms of noise. The information is stored in a quantum error-correcting code, which is a subspace in a larger Hilbert space. This code is designed so that the most common errors move the state into an error space orthogonal to the original code space while preserving the information in the state. It is possible to determine whether an error has occurred by a suitable measurement and to apply a unitary correction that returns the state to the code space without measuring (and hence disturbing) the protected state itself. In general, codewords of a quantum code are entangled states. No code that stores information can protect against all possible errors; instead, codes are designed to correct a specific error set, which should be chosen to match the most likely types of noise. An error set is represented by a set of operators that can multiply the codeword state. Most work on quantum error correction has focused on systems of quantum bits, or qubits, which are two-level quantum systems. These can be physically realized by the states of a spin-1/2 particle, the polarization of a single photon, two distinguished levels of a trapped atom or ion, the current states of a microscopic superconducting loop, or many other physical systems. The most widely used codes are the stabilizer codes, which are closely related to classical linear codes. The code space is the joint +1 eigenspace of a set of commuting Pauli operators on n qubits, called stabilizer generators; the error syndrome is determined by measuring these operators, which allows errors to be diagnosed and corrected. A stabilizer code is characterized by three parameters [[n,k,d]], where n is the number of physical qubits, k is the number of encoded logical qubits, and d is the minimum distance of the code (the smallest number of simultaneous qubit errors that can transform one valid codeword into another). Every useful code has n&gt;k; this physical redundancy is necessary to detect and correct errors without disturbing the logical state. Quantum error correction is used to protect information in quantum communication (where quantum states pass through noisy channels) and quantum computation (where quantum states are transformed through a sequence of imperfect computational steps in the presence of environmental decoherence to solve a computational problem). In quantum computation, error correction is just one component of fault-tolerant design. Other approaches to error mitigation in quantum systems include decoherence-free subspaces, noiseless subsystems, and dynamical decoupling.

Investigating amplitude amplification in optimization-based control for a continuous stirred tank reactor

This chapter presents state-of-the-art and future perspectives of quantum computing and communication. Timeline of relevant findings in quantum informatics, such as quantum algorithms, quantum cryptography protocols, and quantum computing models, is summarized. Mathematics of information representation with quantum states is presented. The quantum circuit and adiabatic models of quantum computation are outlined. The functionality, limitations, and security of the quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol is presented. Current implementations of quantum computers and principles of quantum programming are shortly described.

Natural language processing (NLP) is at the forefront of great advances in contemporary AI, and it is arguably one of the most challenging areas of the field. At the same time, in the area of quantum computing (QC), with the steady growth of quantum hardware and notable improvements towards implementations of quantum algorithms, we are approaching an era when quantum computers perform tasks that cannot be done on classical computers with a reasonable amount of resources. This provides an new range of opportunities for AI, and for NLP specifically. In this work, we work with the Categorical Distributional Compositional (DisCoCat) model of natural language meaning, whose underlying mathematical underpinnings make it amenable to quantum instantiations. Earlier work on fault-tolerant quantum algorithms has already demonstrated potential quantum advantage for NLP, notably employing DisCoCat. In this work, we focus on the capabilities of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware and perform the first implementation of an NLP task on a NISQ processor, using the DisCoCat framework. Sentences are instantiated as parameterised quantum circuits; word-meanings are embedded in quantum states using parameterised quantum-circuits and the sentence’s grammatical structure faithfully manifests as a pattern of entangling operations which compose the word-circuits into a sentence-circuit. The circuits’ parameters are trained using a classical optimiser in a supervised NLP task of binary classification. Our novel QNLP model shows concrete promise for scalability as the quality of the quantum hardware improves in the near future and solidifies a novel branch of experimental research at the intersection of QC and AI.

Quantum computing has emerged as a promising field with the potential to revolutionize information processing and storage. Understanding its current state and research trajectory is crucial. This study aims to map the current literature on quantum computing, to identify how quantum computing is being used in solving quantum software problems and improving quantum algorithms. Moreover, it examines evaluation parameters and the challenges faced in this field. A systematic mapping study was conducted using the SCOPUS database, including all papers up to December 2024. Relevant articles were selected based on inclusion criteria, and a content analysis was performed to categorize and synthesize the findings. Information was gathered from 33 primary studies. Findings show that quantum computing is mainly applied in machine learning and optimization, though classical methods still outperform it. IBM Quantum is the most used platform. Research focuses on algorithm efficiency, verification over validation, and resource optimization, but lacks standardized evaluation methods. Key limitations include hardware constraints, noise, and scalability, while challenges involve integration, error correction, and problem formulation. Quantum computing continues to face significant technological challenges, but current research lays the groundwork for future advances. More practical studies on real hardware and strategies to improve the implementation and performance of quantum algorithms are needed. Effective evaluation, verification, and validation of quantum solutions must be further investigated.