Quantum circuit synthesis with diffusion models

Quantum computing has recently emerged as a transformative technology. Yet, its promised advantages rely on efficiently translating quantum operations into viable physical realizations. Here we use generative machine learning models, specifically denoising diffusion models (DMs), to facilitate this transformation. Leveraging text conditioning, we steer the model to produce desired quantum operations within gate-based quantum circuits. Notably, DMs allow to sidestep during training the exponential overhead inherent in the classical simulation of quantum dynamics—a consistent bottleneck in preceding machine learning techniques. We demonstrate the model’s capabilities across two tasks: entanglement generation and unitary compilation. The model excels at generating new circuits and supports typical DM extensions such as masking and editing to, for instance, align the circuit generation to the constraints of the targeted quantum device. Given their flexibility and generalization abilities, we envision DMs as pivotal in quantum circuit synthesis, both enhancing practical applications and providing insights into theoretical quantum computation.