Kraus Constrained Sequence Learning For Quantum Trajectories from Continuous Measurement
Authors: Priyanshi Singh, Krishna Bhatia
Organizations: Department of Computer Science and Engineering SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, India · QuantumAI Lab, Fractal Analytics Mumbai, India
Real-time reconstruction of conditional quantum states from continuous measurement records is a fundamental requirement for quantum feedback control, yet standard stochastic master equation (SME) solvers require exact model specification, known system parameters, and are sensitive to parameter mismatch. While neural sequence models can fit these stochastic dynamics, the unconstrained predictors can violate physicality such as positivity or trace constraints, leading to unstable rollouts and unphysical estimates. We propose a Kraus-structured output layer that converts the hidden representation of a generic sequence backbone into a completely positive trace preserving (CPTP) quantum operation, yielding physically valid state updates by construction. We instantiate this layer across diverse backbones, RNN, GRU, LSTM, TCN, ESN and Mamba; including Neural ODE as a comparative baseline, on stochastic trajectories characterized by parameter drift. Our evaluation reveals distinct trade-offs between gating mechanisms, linear recurrence, and global attention. Across all models, Kraus-LSTM achieves the strongest results, improving state estimation quality by 7% over its unconstrained counterpart while guaranteeing physically valid predictions in non-stationary regimes.
Figures & tables
Item
Symbol
Value
System dimension
d
2 (Single Qubit)
Time step
Δt
0.005s
Sequence length
T
2000 steps ( 10s total)
# trajectories
train/test
2000/300
Measurement efficiency
η
1.0 (Ideal)
Measured observable
L
σz
Table 1: Dataset Specification for Non-Stationary Switching Dynamics.
Figure 1: Comparative performance of Baseline (unconstrained) vs. Kraus-constrained models. Error bars represent one standard deviation. The Kraus Head provides a consistent fidelity lift for recurrent backbones, effectively acting as a physics-informed regularizer
Model
Baseline Fid. ↑
Kraus Fid. ↑
Δ↑
RNN (Vanilla)
0.6985
0.6949
−0.0036
GRU
0.7462
0.7655
+0.0193
LSTM
0.6997
0.7683
+0.0686
ESN
0.5125
0.6117
+0.0992
TCN (Standard)
0.6863
0.7122
+0.0259
TCN (Gated)
0.6872
0.7055
+0.0183
Table 2: Baseline vs. Kraus-constrained performance on the switching dataset (test set). Δ denotes Kraus minus baseline.
Model
Avg. Fidelity ↑
Bures Dist. ↓
Phase 1 Fid.
Phase 2 Fid.
Kraus-Mamba
0.7388
0.2918
0.7469
0.7360
Neural-ODE
0.7387
0.2918
0.7546
0.7294
Kraus-RNN (Vanilla)
0.6949
0.3430
0.6904
0.6971
Kraus-ESN
0.6117
0.4440
0.6119
0.6098
Kraus-GRU
0.7655
0.2619
0.7690
0.7630
Kraus-LSTM
0.7683
0.2621
0.7707
0.7659
Table 3: Performance Metrics across Dynamical Regimes. Phase 1 denotes steady-state tracking; Phase 2 denotes tracking following the orthogonal Hamiltonian switch. Bures distance serves as the natural geodesic metric for quantum state consistency.
Appendix figures & tables4 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Model
Type
Hidden Dim
LR
Batch
Epochs
Kraus-GRU
Kraus
256
5×10−4
128
100
Kraus-LSTM
Kraus
256
10−3
32
100
Kraus-RNN
Kraus
256
5×10−4
32
100
Kraus-ESN
Kraus
256
5×10−4
128
100
Kraus-TCN (Std)
Kraus
256
5×10−4
32
100
Kraus-TCN (Gated)
Kraus
256
5×10−4
32
100
Appendix
Table 4: Hyperparameter configurations for all architectural families.
Kraus Models (256 Hidden Dim)
Params
Baseline Models (256 Hidden Dim)
Params
Kraus-Transformer (3L)
5.23M
Baseline-Transformer
2.42M
Kraus-TCN Gated
3.68M*
Baseline-TCN Gated
3.68M
Kraus-TCN Standard
1.84M
Baseline-TCN Standard
1.84M
Kraus-Mamba
1.21M
Baseline-Mamba
1.02M
Kraus-LSTM (2L)
1.06M
Baseline-LSTM
0.79M
Kraus-GRU (2L)
0.79M
Baseline-GRU
0.60M
Appendix
Table 5: Trainable Parameter Counts for Kraus-Constrained and Baseline Architectures (All models at 256 hidden dimensions).
Figure 2: Visualization of the Switching Dataset. (Top) The normalized homodyne measurement record yt provided as input to the models. (Bottom) Ground-truth Bloch vector components showing the Phase 1 ( σx -rotation) to Phase 2 ( σy -rotation) transition at the vertical dashed line. The stochastic “jitter” in the Bloch components illustrates the measurement back-action (kicks) modeled by the SME.
Figure 3: Layer-wise gradient norms for Kraus-RNN (left) and Kraus-GRU (right) computed from trained checkpoints. The Kraus-RNN exhibits severe gradient imbalance, with input_proj.weight nearly vanishing ( ∼10−2.5 ) while recurrent weights in later layers receive substantially larger gradients. In contrast, Kraus-GRU maintains comparatively uniform gradient flow across all layers.
Quantum feedback control requires acting on noisy continuous measurement records without direct access to the underlying quantum state. We propose Kraus-Parameterized Belief Reinforcement Learning, a pipeline in which a recurrent encoder, constrained to the Stiefel manifold, produces density-matrix estimates that are guaranteed positive-semidefinite and trace-normalized by construction, embedding quantum state geometry directly into the learning loop. A Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) actor then maps these physically valid belief states to continuous control actions. On a simulated continuously monitored qubit, the resulting policy achieves stable feedback control, maintaining a measurement-conditioned belief fidelity of approximately 0.77-0.80 and exhibiting substantially lower return variance than a parameter-matched LSTM-history baseline across both nominal and out-of-distribution conditions. Although gains in raw target fidelity are modest, the geometric constraint guarantees a physically valid, interpretable belief representation and yields markedly more stable control under measurement inefficiency and abrupt dynamics switches. These results indicate that physics-informed neural memory is a practical inductive bias for reliable quantum feedback control.
Priyanshi Singh, Krishna Bhatia
Department of Computer Science and Engineering SRM Institute of Science and Technology Chennai, India · QuantumAI Lab Fractal AI Research Mumbai, India
We introduce a sequence modeling framework in which the latent state is a complex-valued wave function evolving on a finite-dimensional Hilbert space under a learned, time-dependent Hamiltonian. Unlike standard recurrent architectures that rely on gating mechanisms to suppress competing hypotheses, our framework utilizes quantum interference: the Hamiltonian steers the phases of complex amplitudes so that conflicting interpretations cancel while compatible ones reinforce. The dynamics are strictly unitary, ensuring that the state norm is preserved exactly at every time step via a Cayley (Crank--Nicolson) discretization. Token probabilities are extracted using the Born rule, a quadratic measurement operator that couples magnitudes and relative phases. Our primary theoretical contribution is a separation theorem characterizing the representational advantage of this readout: we define a family of disambiguation tasks that a complex unitary model of dimension N solves exactly, but which requires a state dimension of Ω(N2) for any real-valued orthogonal model equipped with a standard affine-softmax readout. This quadratic gap arises because the Born rule implicitly lifts the N-dimensional state into the space of rank-one Hermitian matrices, accessing pairwise phase correlations that are inaccessible to linear projections. Finally, we derive a continuity equation for the latent probability mass, yielding conserved pairwise currents that serve as a built-in diagnostic for tracing information flow between dimensions.
Recent advances in quantum computing and machine learning have motivated the development of quantum models for sequential data processing. In this paper, we propose a Recursive Quantum Long Short-Term Memory model, or Recursive QLSTM, which extends QLSTM through metacore-based recursive constructions. We numerically test the model under different input sequence lengths, metacore designs, and recursive rules, and identify the best-performing architecture among these variants. For this selected model, we further provide theoretical arguments explaining why its recursive structure improves temporal information propagation and enhances learning performance. Our results suggest that Recursive QLSTM offers a flexible and effective framework for quantum recurrent learning over input time series of various lengths.
Samuel Yen-Chi Chen, Yifeng Peng, Jiun-Cheng Jiang +8
Wells Fargo · Stevens Institute of Technology · National Taiwan University +3