Effective implementation of high-level quantum gates is essential for practical quantum computing. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first reported 12-CNOT decomposition of the double qubit excitation operator, improving upon state-of-the-art (SOTA) implementations with 13 CNOTs. Our new circuit has the lowest CNOT count (12), lowest CNOT depth (10), and lowest total circuit depth (16) among all the previous SOTA circuits. Further, we only added 2 extra one-qubit gates compared to the lowest one-qubit gate count (11) among the previous SOTA circuits.
Piotr Malkowski, Domenik Eichhorn, Joshua Ammermann +4quant-ph cs.LG cs.SE
Quantum software engineering is an emerging research field focusing on efficiently embedding the quantum programming paradigm into existing software ecosystems. A key aspect of this field is the realization of quantum algorithms using gate-based programming and the subsequent low-level optimization of the resulting quantum circuits, a process that is commonly performed by so-called transpilation pipelines. One significant challenge in these pipelines is determining which optimizations to apply to a given circuit. This decision is usually based on fixed default configurations that are uniformly applied to all circuits, frequently resulting in missed opportunities for more aggressive circuit optimization. In this work, we tackle this challenge by applying autotuning with supervised machine learning to develop an automated method for selection of transpiler passes. To train our machine-learning models, we employ feature-model based sampling to generate a representative dataset that examines how different combinations of Qiskit transpiler passes perform across thousands of circuits drawn from the state-of-the-art benchmarking suite MQT Bench. Using these data, we build a predictive model extension for the Qiskit transpilation pipeline that uses a machine learning model to automatically select combinations of transpiler passes aiming to achieve a maximum reduction in two-qubit gates. Our empirical evaluation shows that the combinations selected by our model are never outperformed by Qiskit's optimization levels, achieve on average an additional 19.1$\%$ - 32.4$\%$ reduction in two-qubit gates, and for some circuits finds reductions of up to $95.8\%$ in cases where Qiskit achieves no reduction at all.