This work constructs a native 2D pairwise ansatz and compares its expressibility and trainability with representative 1D ansatze at identical layer depths, despite their different circuit depths.
Abstract
Parameterized quantum circuits~(PQCs) constitute a central building block of variational quantum algorithms~(VQAs) and quantum machine learning~(QML) methods. Existing ansatz designs often adopt hardware-agnostic or simplified 1D chain/ring entanglement patterns. However, as quantum hardware continues to develop, native 2D connectivity patterns, such as planar superconducting-qubit architectures, are becoming increasingly important. Inspired by this hardware structure, we construct a native 2D pairwise ansatz and compare its expressibility and trainability with representative 1D ansatze at identical layer depths, despite their different circuit depths. For the fixed 16-qubit system, the 2D ansatz has the smallest KL divergence at $L=1$ and $2$, and its second-order frame potential approaches the theoretical lower bound more rapidly at shallow layer counts than the frame potentials of the three 1D ansatze. We also evaluate the gradient variance of the Pauli-$Z$-string expectation value $\langle Z_0\otimes\cdots\otimes Z_{15}\rangle$ with respect to the first $R_y$ angle. For this Pauli-$Z$ string and fixed parameter, the gradient variance is smaller for the 2D circuit at $L=1$--$4$. The differences narrow at $L=5$, and the four ansatze yield statistically compatible variances at $L=6$.
The unitary brick-wall is proposed: a $k-particle fermionic architecture for nearest-neighbor hardware, combining Reconfigurable Beam Splitter gates with interleaved single-qubit phase gates and a non-Gaussian magic-state encoding.
Projected entangled pair states (PEPS) provide an efficient variational ansatz for two-dimensional quantum phases, but computing observables remains challenging because PEPS contraction is generally costly. Here, we parameterize two-dimensional quantum states using variational PEPS subject to isometric constraints and map the resulting ansatz onto monitored quantum circuits, replacing tensor-network contraction with circuit sampling. For infinite cylinders, the transfer matrix defines a quantum channel on the virtual boundary. We use a fixed-point treatment and a monitored-circuit unraveling of this channel to evaluate observables efficiently. Using a constant number of variational parameters and a number of qubits that scales only with the cylinder width, our method yields a phase diagram for the $J_1$-$J_2$ model in qualitative agreement with DMRG results. Because the monitored circuits are compatible with near-term quantum hardware, this approach provides a hybrid quantum-classical framework for simulating two-dimensional quantum many-body systems.
Yuqing Rong, Huanhai Zhou, Guo-Yi Zhu et al.· 0 citations
This work examines when structured long-range connectivity provides a useful resource, focusing on sparse power-of-two (PWR2) coupling graphs, and identifies circuit geometry and qubit reconfigurability as task-dependent resources for variational algorithms.
Helene M. Losl, Aydin Deger, Andrew J. Daley· 0 citations
Multipartite entanglement is a critical property of parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs), particularly for near-term hybrid quantum-classical algorithms, as it characterizes their ability to generate highly entangled states. However, measuring entanglement remains computationally expensive because conventional Monte Carlo sampling scales unfavorably with system size. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a graph-based transformer surrogate that predicts both the first-order Meyer-Wallach measure ($Q_1$) and the second-order Scott measure ($Q_2$), resolving entanglement structures indistinguishable under $Q_1$ alone. Our central contribution is the qubit-interconnected graph (QIG) encoding for transformers, where each node represents a qubit and weighted adjacencies record entangling-gate multiplicities. Fused with a gate-level DAG encoder, this yields the QIG-Fusion model. Evaluated on 50,000 circuits spanning 4- to 8-qubit systems across a ten-seed protocol, QIG-Fusion achieves an RMSE as low as 0.037 ($Q_2$) and 0.038 ($Q_1$), with a Spearman rank correlation up to 0.95. This framework significantly reduces the computational cost of Quantum Architecture Search (QAS), enabling efficient entanglement estimation for large-scale PQCs.
Darell Timothy Tarigan, Fadhil Fatih Shiddiq, H. L. Prihadi et al.· 0 citations
A central promise of useful quantum advantage is the ability to compute ground states of Hamiltonian systems beyond the reach of classical simulation methods. Here we demonstrate that this problem can be effectively amortized across an arbitrary and universal set of Hamiltonians by a foundation model with $\sim0.5$B variational parameters, trained with contemporary techniques from large language models and deep reinforcement learning. To do this, we formulate $\text{spin-}1/2$ quantum ground-state learning as manifold variational optimisation over centrally odd scalar functions on $\mathrm{SU}(2)^N$. This replaces explicit Hilbert-space vector amplitudes with manifold functions on which the Hamiltonian acts through Lie derivatives, evaluated by custom automatic differentiation primitives. We prove that the resulting variational principle on this manifold preserves the $\text{spin-}1/2$ sector's ground-state upper bound using the Peter-Weyl theorem and justify the choice of such a representation with a no-go theorem for pure state foundation NQS. We then pre-train our foundation model on a dataset of hundreds of thousands of different Hamiltonian systems, varying the connection topology, system size, interaction types and strengths, bringing together a century of many-body literature. Using a novel $\mathrm{SU}(2)$ replica-exchange Langevin sampler and sharded natural-gradient optimisation, we train our model with our own extension of the Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature (KFAC) optimiser on system sizes up to 64 qubits. On a held-out generalisation dataset, we fine-tune our model on system sizes of up to 1024 qubits, and evaluate on systems up to 8100 qubits.
Timothy Heightman, Elena Orlova, Philip Mantrov et al.· 0 citations
Variational quantum circuits have been central to many proposed near-term applications of quantum computing, but a growing body of evidence suggests that trainability and quantum advantage are fundamentally at odds: ans\"atze expressive enough to resist efficient classical simulation tend to exhibit barren plateaus, while structures that provably rule out barren plateaus typically render them classically simulable. We propose a stacked linear combination of unitaries (S-LCU) as a variational ansatz which provides a tunable trade-off between barren plateaus and classical simulability. Using a diagrammatic analysis, we bound the loss-landscape variance of the Free Fermion S-LCU, whose elements are fermionic Gaussian unitaries. We prove a variance lower bound of $\Omega(1/(n k^{3l}))$, with a simulation cost of $O(k^{2l} n^3)$ using the best known classical algorithm, compared to a quantum gate complexity of only $O(lkn^2)$. The number of layers $l$ serves as a single dial that trades computational complexity against the rate of cost concentration. This offers practitioners a systematic method for constructing ans\"atze with a complexity-trainability trade-off that best suits their application and hardware.