Quartz: Superoptimization of Quantum Circuits (Extended Version)

TL;DR

Quartz is a quantum circuit superoptimizer that automatically generates and verifies circuit transformations for various gate sets, improving optimization over manual methods by exploring small circuits and using theorem proving.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic, automated approach to generate and verify quantum circuit transformations for arbitrary gate sets, reducing manual effort and enhancing optimization.

Findings

Quartz effectively generates transformations for multiple gate sets.

It covers existing manual transformations and discovers new ones.

Quartz outperforms or matches hand-tuned optimizers.

Abstract

Existing quantum compilers optimize quantum circuits by applying circuit transformations designed by experts. This approach requires significant manual effort to design and implement circuit transformations for different quantum devices, which use different gate sets, and can miss optimizations that are hard to find manually. We propose Quartz, a quantum circuit superoptimizer that automatically generates and verifies circuit transformations for arbitrary quantum gate sets. For a given gate set, Quartz generates candidate circuit transformations by systematically exploring small circuits and verifies the discovered transformations using an automated theorem prover. To optimize a quantum circuit, Quartz uses a cost-based backtracking search that applies the verified transformations to the circuit. Our evaluation on three popular gate sets shows that Quartz can effectively generate and verify transformations for different gate sets. The generated transformations cover manually designed transformations used by existing optimizers and also include new transformations. Quartz is therefore able to optimize a broad range of circuits for diverse gate sets, outperforming or matching the performance of hand-tuned circuit optimizers.