“Universal Quantum Control through Deep Reinforcement Learning”, Murphy Yuezhen Niu, Sergio Boixo, Vadim N. Smelyanskiy, Hartmut Neven2019-04-23 (, , ; backlinks; similar)⁠:

Emerging reinforcement learning techniques using deep neural networks have shown great promise in control optimization. They harness non-local regularities of noisy control trajectories and facilitate transfer learning between tasks. To leverage these powerful capabilities for quantum control optimization, we propose a new control framework to simultaneously optimize the speed and fidelity of quantum computation against both leakage and stochastic control errors.

For a broad family of two-qubit unitary gates that are important for quantum simulation of many-electron systems, we improve the control robustness by adding control noise into training environments for reinforcement learning agents trained with trusted-region-policy-optimization. The agent control solutions demonstrate a two-order-of-magnitude reduction in average-gate-error over baseline stochastic-gradient-descent solutions and up to a one-order-of-magnitude reduction in gate time from optimal gate synthesis counterparts. These substantial improvements in both fidelity and runtime are achieved by combining new physical understandings and state-of-the-art machine learning techniques.

Our results open a venue for wider applications in quantum simulation, quantum chemistry and quantum supremacy tests using near-term quantum devices.