quant-phMar 23, 2026

Latent Style-based Quantum Wasserstein GAN for Drug Design

Authors: Julien Baglio, Yacine Haddad, Richard Polifka

Organizations: Center for Quantum Computing and Quantum Coherence (QC2), Department of Physics, University of Basel, Klingelbergstrasse 82, CH-4056 Basel, Switzerland · QuantumBasel, Schorenweg 44b, CH-4144 Arlesheim, Switzerland · Laboratory for High Energy Physics (LHEP), Physics Institute, Faculty of Sciences, University of Bern, Sidlerstrasse 5, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland · Open Quantum Institute and Quantum Technology Initiative, CERN, Esplanade des Particules 1, CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland

Abstract

The development of new drugs is a tedious, time-consuming, and expensive process, for which the average costs are estimated to be up to around $2.5 billion. The first step in this long process is the design of the new drug, for which de novo drug design, assisted by artificial intelligence, has blossomed in recent years and revolutionized the field. In particular, generative artificial intelligence has delivered promising results in drug discovery and development, reducing costs and the time to solution. However, classical generative models, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs), are difficult to train due to barren plateaus and prone to mode collapse. Quantum computing may be an avenue to overcome these issues and provide models with fewer parameters, thereby enhancing the generalizability of GANs. We propose a new style-based quantum GAN (QGAN) architecture for drug design that implements noise encoding at every rotational gate of the circuit and a gradient penalty in the loss function to mitigate mode collapse. Our pipeline employs a variational autoencoder to represent the molecular structure in a latent space, which is then used as input to our QGAN. Our baseline model runs on up to 15 qubits to validate our architecture on quantum simulators, and a 156-qubit IBM Heron quantum computer in the five-qubit setup is used for inference to investigate the effects of using real quantum hardware on the analysis. We benchmark our results against classical models as provided by the MOSES benchmark suite.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables29 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

Feb 17, 2026

Molecular Design beyond Training Data with Novel Extended Objective Functionals of Generative AI Models Driven by Quantum Annealing Computer

Deep generative modeling to stochastically design small molecules is an emerging technology for accelerating drug discovery and development. However, one major issue in molecular generative models is their lower frequency of drug-like compounds. To resolve this problem, we developed a novel framework for optimization of deep generative models integrated with a D-Wave quantum annealing computer, where our Neural Hash Function (NHF) presented herein is used both as the regularization and binarization schemes simultaneously, of which the latter is for transformation between continuous and discrete signals of the classical and quantum neural networks, respectively, in the error evaluation (i.e., objective) function. The compounds generated via the quantum-annealing generative models exhibited higher quality in both validity and drug-likeness than those generated via the fully-classical models, and was further indicated to exceed even the training data in terms of drug-likeness features, without any restraints and conditions to deliberately induce such an optimization. These results indicated an advantage of quantum annealing to aim at a stochastic generator integrated with our novel neural network architectures, for the extended performance of feature space sampling and extraction of characteristic features in drug design.
Feb 27, 2026

Scaling Quantum Machine Learning without Tricks: Full-Resolution and Diverse Image Generation

Quantum generative modeling is a rapidly evolving discipline at the intersection of quantum computing and machine learning. Contemporary quantum machine learning is generally limited to toy examples or heavily restricted datasets with few elements. This is not only due to the current limitations of available quantum hardware but also due to the absence of inductive biases arising from application-agnostic designs. Current quantum solutions must resort to tricks to scale down high-resolution images, such as relying heavily on dimensionality reduction or utilizing multiple quantum models for low-resolution image patches. Building on recent developments in classical image loading to quantum computers, we circumvent these limitations and train quantum Wasserstein GANs on the established classical MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets. Using the complete datasets, our system generates full-resolution images across all ten classes and establishes a new state-of-the-art performance with a single end-to-end quantum generator without tricks. As a proof-of-principle, we also demonstrate that our approach can be extended to color images, exemplified on the Street View House Numbers dataset. We analyze how the choice of variational circuit architecture introduces inductive biases, which crucially unlock this performance. Furthermore, enhanced noise input techniques enable highly diverse image generation while maintaining quality. Finally, we show promising results even under quantum shot noise conditions.
Jun 11, 2026

An LLM System for Autonomous Variational Quantum Circuit Design

The design of high performing quantum circuits remains largely dependent on human expertise. We introduce an autonomous agentic framework that employs large language models (LLMs) to conduct iterative quantum circuit designs under explicit design constraints. Our system integrates seven components: Exploration, Generation, Discussion, Validation, Storage, Evaluation, and Review. These components form a closed-loop workflow that combines web-based knowledge acquisition, literature-grounded critique, executable code generation, and experimental feedback. We evaluate the framework on two tasks: quantum feature map construction for quantum machine learning and ansatz generation for variational quantum eigensolver applications in quantum chemistry. In image classification benchmarks, the best generated feature map outperforms representative quantum feature maps and, when scaled to larger qubit counts, surpasses the classical radial basis function kernel. In molecular ground state estimation across seven molecules, the generated ansatz attains competitive accuracy with widely used chemically inspired and hardware-efficient constructions while satisfying the imposed scaling constraints. These results establish LLM driven agentic system as a viable paradigm for automated quantum circuit design and illustrate how AI systems can participate in iterative scientific optimization workflows across scientific domains.