Jun Dai, Olivier Nahman-Lévesque, Guillaume Rabusseau +2quant-ph cs.LG
Extracting quantum information from a quantum state is a fundamental task of quantum computation, often requiring the estimation of many non-commuting observables under a finite measurement budget. For both near-term and early fault-tolerant settings, the measurement protocol must balance statistical efficiency against implementation resources such as circuit depth, connectivity, and entangling-gate count. Many existing strategies focus on two extremes: hardware-friendly product measurements with high sampling cost, and fully commuting measurements with deep circuits. Here we recast resource-constrained measurement design as a generative learning problem. We introduce FlowMeas, which uses a generative flow network to directly sample finite ensembles of shallow Clifford measurement circuits subject to a prescribed shot budget and hardware constraints. At zero entangling depth, FlowMeas learns qubit-wise commuting measurement schedules and already matches or improves leading product-measurement methods on nearly all molecular benchmarks. Allowing one or two entangling gate layers yields further reductions in energy estimation error of up to $27\%$ relative to the strongest state-independent product-measurement baseline. The learned policy can also be reused across related Hamiltonians, substantially accelerating retraining along a molecular potential-energy surface. We further obtain results for molecular Hamiltonians with up to 20 qubits and apply the framework to a compactly encoded 54-qubit interacting fermionic model, extending the demonstrated scale beyond prior molecular benchmarks. These results establish generative learning as a flexible and unified framework for quantum measurement design under practical resource constraints.
Quantum state tomography is sample-starved, and the states one prepares live on a narrow, learnable manifold. A $k{=}0$ prior-only control shows that on concentrated families a prior estimate is already near-optimal, so ``high fidelity at few measurements'' can be family memorization rather than tomography; genuine measurement-efficiency needs a model that conditions on the measurements and demonstrably uses them. On a shared matrix-product-state (MPS) core parameterization we study two routes. Approach~A learns a generative prior over MPS cores with measurement-guided posterior inference (gold-standard-validated, but whose few-measurement accuracy the control shows is largely the prior). Approach~B, our main proposal, is a \emph{fixed-protocol amortized} MPS estimator trained once with a gauge-invariant fidelity loss; we deliberately do not rest it on a permutation-invariant set encoder (a plain MLP matches it). The decisive lever is the measurement design: motivated by the fact that local reduced density matrices determine a $χ$-MPS, conditioning on an \emph{informative local} Pauli set rather than random strings turns a modest, memorization-prone estimator into a high-fidelity one ($\approx\!0.95$, up to $+0.59$ over prior-only, decisively passing a shuffled-measurement control). A dropout ensemble, conformally recalibrated, gives $\approx\!90\%$-coverage intervals -- including for observables never measured, where a shot-based interval does not exist. Quality holds as the system grows (fidelity $0.90$ at $n{=}10$, gain \emph{growing} in $n$; $0.88$ at bond dimension $χ{=}4$), the parameterization is polynomial (native contraction to $20$ qubits), and we close the loop on IBM hardware ($5$ states at $0.97$ from hardware-measured Paulis).
Aggregate reliability estimates can obscure heterogeneity in measurement-design burden across response conditions, so a single G- or D-study may mischaracterize a design's adequacy for particular strata. This study introduces a conditional generalizability framework with three components. First, automated scoring configurations -- the encoder architectures and scoring-head families admissible within a fixed pipeline -- are treated as a universe of admissible measurement conditions rather than incidental modeling choices. Second, analytical D-study projections are compared with empirical configuration sweeps over a finite scoring pool, yielding two estimands of design adequacy whose agreement or divergence diagnoses the realized configuration universe. Third, evidence is conditioned on entropy-defined response strata, treating entropy as an operational stratification variable, not a construct claim about writing quality. Whereas recent generalizability-theory extensions address AI-generated item variants on the response side, this framework addresses the analogous scoring-side problem: AI-mediated scoring configurations. Demonstrated with automated essay scoring of timed L2 writing, the realized design was dependable in aggregate (Phi approx 0.76). Re-estimated within entropy strata, dependability stayed high but declined modestly and robustly (Phi = 0.88, 0.87, 0.84) -- a gradient implying different decision-study requirements, the highest-entropy stratum requiring the most crossed conditions. The framework offers a portable workflow for evaluating nonuniform dependability.
Generative models are increasingly used as priors for inverse problems, but their ability to produce realistic images creates a basic trust problem: a plausible reconstruction may be supported by the measurements, or it may be filled in by the prior along unobserved directions. This distinction is especially important in medical imaging, where acquisition operators are designed under scan-time, dose, and calibration constraints. We study generative inverse problems from a measurement-geometry perspective. The central question is whether a fixed measurement operator can distinguish nearby images that are plausible under the generative prior, and whether this relationship can guide better measurements. We introduce a local measurement-manifold compatibility measure that quantifies how well the operator observes prior-relevant tangent directions. Under local regularity assumptions, we prove that this quantity controls the stable part of the reconstruction error, while the generative prior controls off-manifold drift. This worst-direction certificate motivates practical fixed and sequential acquisition rules based on overall local volume preservation, including a posterior-cloud design that adapts measurements at test time without training a sampling policy. Across row-sampling, tomographic, and MR acquisition settings, the proposed scores predict failure modes, explain measurement-induced hallucinations, and guide better sampling. In fastMRI Cartesian sampling, posterior-cloud measurement design improves over strong non-learned ACS-preserving baselines, including variable-density and Poisson-like masks.