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Qubits are the fundamental building blocks of quantum information science and applications, whose concept is widely utilized in both quantum physics and quantum computation. While the significance of qubits and their implementation in physical devices have been extensively examined, now is the right time to revisit this understanding. In this paper, we introduce an abstract qubit model (AQM), offering a mathematical framework for higher-level algorithms and applications, and setting forth criteria for lower-level physical devices to enable quantum computation. We first provide a comprehensive definition of "qubits", regarded as the foundational principle for quantum computing algorithms (bottom-up support), and examine their requisites for devices (top-down demand). We then investigate the feasibility of relaxing specific requirements, thereby broadening device support while considering techniques that tradeoff extra costs to counterbalance this relaxation. Lastly, we delve into the quantum applications that only require partial support of "qubits", and discuss the physical systems with limited support of the AQM but remain valuable in quantum applications. AQM may serve as an intermediate interface between quantum algorithms and devices, facilitating quantum algorithm-device co-design., Comment: 36 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables

Near-term quantum computing technologies grapple with huge complexity overheads, hindering their ability to induce algorithms, necessitating engineering and scientific innovations. One class of problems of interest is Quantum Simulation, whereby quantum systems are simulated using a quantum computer. However, current devices are yet to surpass classical tensor network techniques. For problems of interest, where classical simulation techniques fail, large degrees of entanglement are required. Another challenge of implementing quantum simulation problems is that qubits sit idle whilst alternating simulation terms are implemented, exposing the system to decoherence. In the near term, 2D planar superconducting lattices of circuit-QED elements such as the transmon continue to draw substantial attention, but they are hindered by their nearest neighbor topology and relatively short lifespan, two problems that are problematic for quantum simulation. One technology of particular interest is the multi-mode superconducting resonator capable of storing multiple qubits in one device. We observe that these cavities have a natural virtual topology that aligns particularly well with quantum simulation problems, and exhibit much longer lifespans in comparison to other planar superconducting hardware. In this paper we present MUCIC, we discuss the simple integration of these devices into the current landscape and their implications to quantum simulation, motivated by their alignment to the quantum simulation problem, and potential as a quantum memory candidate. We report the development of MUCICs transpiler, leading to reductions of up to 82% in quantum simulation circuit depths. Additionally, our investigation demonstrates improvements of up to 19.4% in converged results from Variational Quantum Algorithms.

Automating radiology report generation can ease the reporting workload for radiologists. However, existing works focus mainly on the chest area due to the limited availability of public datasets for other regions. Besides, they often rely on naive data-driven approaches, e.g., a basic encoder-decoder framework with captioning loss, which limits their ability to recognise complex patterns across diverse anatomical regions. To address these issues, we propose X-RGen, a radiologist-minded report generation framework across six anatomical regions. In X-RGen, we seek to mimic the behaviour of human radiologists, breaking them down into four principal phases: 1) initial observation, 2) cross-region analysis, 3) medical interpretation, and 4) report formation. Firstly, we adopt an image encoder for feature extraction, akin to a radiologist's preliminary review. Secondly, we enhance the recognition capacity of the image encoder by analysing images and reports across various regions, mimicking how radiologists gain their experience and improve their professional ability from past cases. Thirdly, just as radiologists apply their expertise to interpret radiology images, we introduce radiological knowledge of multiple anatomical regions to further analyse the features from a clinical perspective. Lastly, we generate reports based on the medical-aware features using a typical auto-regressive text decoder. Both natural language generation (NLG) and clinical efficacy metrics show the effectiveness of X-RGen on six X-ray datasets. Our code and checkpoints are available at: https://github.com/YtongXie/X-RGen., Comment: Accepted by ACCV 2024 (Oral)

Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Computing (NISQ) has dominated headlines in recent years, with the longer-term vision of Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation (FTQC) offering significant potential albeit at currently intractable resource costs and quantum error correction (QEC) overheads. For problems of interest, FTQC will require millions of physical qubits with long coherence times, high-fidelity gates, and compact sizes to surpass classical systems. Just as heterogeneous specialization has offered scaling benefits in classical computing, it is likewise gaining interest in FTQC. However, systematic use of heterogeneity in either hardware or software elements of FTQC systems remains a serious challenge due to the vast design space and variable physical constraints. This paper meets the challenge of making heterogeneous FTQC design practical by introducing HetArch, a toolbox for designing heterogeneous quantum systems, and using it to explore heterogeneous design scenarios. Using a hierarchical approach, we successively break quantum algorithms into smaller operations (akin to classical application kernels), thus greatly simplifying the design space and resulting tradeoffs. Specializing to superconducting systems, we then design optimized heterogeneous hardware composed of varied superconducting devices, abstracting physical constraints into design rules that enable devices to be assembled into standard cells optimized for specific operations. Finally, we provide a heterogeneous design space exploration framework which reduces the simulation burden by a factor of 10^4 or more and allows us to characterize optimal design points. We use these techniques to design superconducting quantum modules for entanglement distillation, error correction, and code teleportation, reducing error rates by 2.6x, 10.7x, and 3.0x compared to homogeneous systems.

Recently, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research (BER), and Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) programs organized and held the Artificial Intelligence for Earth System Predictability (AI4ESP) workshop series. From this workshop, a critical conclusion that the DOE BER and ASCR community came to is the requirement to develop a new paradigm for Earth system predictability focused on enabling artificial intelligence (AI) across the field, lab, modeling, and analysis activities, called ModEx. The BER's `Model-Experimentation', ModEx, is an iterative approach that enables process models to generate hypotheses. The developed hypotheses inform field and laboratory efforts to collect measurement and observation data, which are subsequently used to parameterize, drive, and test model (e.g., process-based) predictions. A total of 17 technical sessions were held in this AI4ESP workshop series. This paper discusses the topic of the `AI Architectures and Co-design' session and associated outcomes. The AI Architectures and Co-design session included two invited talks, two plenary discussion panels, and three breakout rooms that covered specific topics, including: (1) DOE HPC Systems, (2) Cloud HPC Systems, and (3) Edge computing and Internet of Things (IoT). We also provide forward-looking ideas and perspectives on potential research in this co-design area that can be achieved by synergies with the other 16 session topics. These ideas include topics such as: (1) reimagining co-design, (2) data acquisition to distribution, (3) heterogeneous HPC solutions for integration of AI/ML and other data analytics like uncertainty quantification with earth system modeling and simulation, and (4) AI-enabled sensor integration into earth system measurements and observations. Such perspectives are a distinguishing aspect of this paper., Comment: 23 pages, 1 figure

Many proposals to scale quantum technology rely on modular or distributed designs where individual quantum processors, called nodes, are linked together to form one large multinode quantum computer (MNQC). One scalable method to construct an MNQC is using superconducting quantum systems with optical interconnects. However, a limiting factor of these machines will be internode gates, which may be two to three orders of magnitude noisier and slower than local operations. Surmounting the limitations of internode gates will require a range of techniques, including improvements in entanglement generation, the use of entanglement distillation, and optimized software and compilers, and it remains unclear how improvements to these components interact to affect overall system performance, what performance from each is required, or even how to quantify the performance of each. In this paper, we employ a `co-design' inspired approach to quantify overall MNQC performance in terms of hardware models of internode links, entanglement distillation, and local architecture. In the case of superconducting MNQCs with microwave-to-optical links, we uncover a tradeoff between entanglement generation and distillation that threatens to degrade performance. We show how to navigate this tradeoff, lay out how compilers should optimize between local and internode gates, and discuss when noisy quantum links have an advantage over purely classical links. Using these results, we introduce a roadmap for the realization of early MNQCs which illustrates potential improvements to the hardware and software of MNQCs and outlines criteria for evaluating the landscape, from progress in entanglement generation and quantum memory to dedicated algorithms such as distributed quantum phase estimation. While we focus on superconducting devices with optical interconnects, our approach is general across MNQC implementations., Comment: 23 pages, white paper

Quantum Machine Learning continues to be a highly active area of interest within Quantum Computing. Many of these approaches have adapted classical approaches to the quantum settings, such as QuantumFlow, etc. We push forward this trend and demonstrate an adaption of the Classical Convolutional Neural Networks to quantum systems - namely QuCNN. QuCNN is a parameterised multi-quantum-state based neural network layer computing similarities between each quantum filter state and each quantum data state. With QuCNN, back propagation can be achieved through a single-ancilla qubit quantum routine. QuCNN is validated by applying a convolutional layer with a data state and a filter state over a small subset of MNIST images, comparing the back propagated gradients, and training a filter state against an ideal target state.

The field of quantum computing has experienced a rapid expansion in recent years, with ongoing exploration of new technologies, a decrease in error rates, and a growth in the number of qubits available in quantum processors. However, near-term quantum algorithms are still unable to be induced without compounding consequential levels of noise, leading to non-trivial erroneous results. Quantum Error Correction and Mitigation are rapidly advancing areas of research in the quantum computing landscape, with a goal of reducing errors. IBM has recently emphasized that Quantum Error Mitigation is the key to unlocking the full potential of quantum computing. A recent work, namely HAMMER, demonstrated the existence of a latent structure regarding post-circuit induction errors when mapping to the Hamming spectrum. However, they assumed that errors occur solely in local clusters, whereas we observe that at higher average Hamming distances this structure falls away. Our study demonstrates that the correlated structure is not just limited to local patterns, but it also encompasses certain non-local clustering patterns that can be accurately characterized through a Poisson distribution model. This model takes into account the input circuit, the current state of the device, including calibration statistics, and the qubit topology. Using this quantum error characterizing model, we developed an iterative algorithm over the generated Bayesian network state-graph for post-induction error mitigation. Our Q-Beep approach delivers state-of-the-art results, thanks to its problem-aware modeling of the error distribution's underlying structure and the implementation of an Bayesian network state-graph. This has resulted in an increase of up to 234.6% in circuit execution accuracy on BV circuits and an average improvement of 71.0% in the quality of QAOA solutions when tested on 16 IBMQ quantum processors.

Variational quantum algorithm (VQA), which is comprised of a classical optimizer and a parameterized quantum circuit, emerges as one of the most promising approaches for harvesting the power of quantum computers in the noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) era. However, the deployment of VQAs on contemporary NISQ devices often faces considerable system and time-dependant noise and prohibitively slow training speeds. On the other hand, the expensive supporting resources and infrastructure make quantum computers extremely keen on high utilization. In this paper, we propose a virtualized way of building up a quantum backend for variational quantum algorithms: rather than relying on a single physical device which tends to introduce temporal-dependant device-specific noise with worsening performance as time-since-calibration grows, we propose to constitute a quantum ensemble, which dynamically distributes quantum tasks asynchronously across a set of physical devices, and adjusting the ensemble configuration with respect to machine status. In addition to reduced machine-dependant noise, the ensemble can provide significant speedups for VQA training. With this idea, we build a novel VQA training framework called EQC that comprises: (i) a system architecture for asynchronous parallel VQA cooperative training; (ii) an analytic model for assessing the quality of the returned VQA gradient over a particular device concerning its architecture, transpilation, and runtime conditions; (iii) a weighting mechanism to adjust the quantum ensemble's computational contribution according to the systems' current performance. Evaluations comprising 500K circuit evaluations across 10 IBMQ devices using a VQE and a QAOA applications demonstrate that EQC can attain error rates close to the most performant device of the ensemble, while boosting the training speed by 10.5x on average (up to 86x and at least 5.2x).

The rapid development of quantum computing (QC) in the NISQ era urgently demands a low-level benchmark suite and insightful evaluation metrics for characterizing the properties of prototype NISQ devices, the efficiency of QC programming compilers, schedulers and assemblers, and the capability of quantum system simulators in a classical computer. In this work, we fill this gap by proposing a low-level, easy-to-use benchmark suite called QASMBench based on the OpenQASM assembly representation. It consolidates commonly used quantum routines and kernels from a variety of domains including chemistry, simulation, linear algebra, searching, optimization, arithmetic, machine learning, fault tolerance, cryptography, etc., trading-off between generality and usability. To analyze these kernels in terms of NISQ device execution, in addition to circuit width and depth, we propose four circuit metrics including gate density, retention lifespan, measurement density, and entanglement variance, to extract more insights about the execution efficiency, the susceptibility to NISQ error, and the potential gain from machine-specific optimizations. Applications in QASMBench can be launched and verified on several NISQ platforms, including IBM-Q, Rigetti, IonQ and Quantinuum. For evaluation, we measure the execution fidelity of a subset of QASMBench applications on 12 IBM-Q machines through density matrix state tomography, which comprises 25K circuit evaluations. We also compare the fidelity of executions among the IBM-Q machines, the IonQ QPU and the Rigetti Aspen M-1 system. QASMBench is released at: http://github.com/pnnl/QASMBench.