quant-phApr 23, 2026

Replay-buffer engineering for noise-robust quantum circuit optimization

Authors: Akash KunduSebastian Feld

Organizations: 1Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands · 2Quantum Computing Division, QuTech, The Netherlands

Abstract

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) for quantum circuit optimization faces three fundamental bottlenecks: replay buffers that ignore the reliability of temporal-difference (TD) targets, curriculum-based architecture search that triggers a full quantum-classical evaluation at every environment step, and the routine discard of noiseless trajectories when retraining under hardware noise. We address all three by treating the replay buffer as a primary algorithmic lever for quantum optimization. We introduce ReaPER++, an annealed replay rule that transitions from TD error-driven prioritization early in training to reliability-aware sampling as value estimates mature, achieving 432×4-32\times gains in sample efficiency over fixed PER, ReaPER, and uniform replay while consistently discovering more compact circuits across quantum compilation and QAS benchmarks; validation on LunarLander-v3 confirms the principle is domain-agnostic. Furthermore we eliminate the quantum-classical evaluation bottleneck in curriculum RL by introducing OptCRLQAS which amortizes expensive evaluations over multiple architectural edits, cutting wall-clock time per episode by up to 67.5%67.5\% on a 12-qubit optimization problem without degrading solution quality. Finally we introduce a lightweight replay-buffer transfer scheme that warm-starts noisy-setting learning by reusing noiseless trajectories, without network-weight transfer or εε-greedy pretraining. This reduces steps to chemical accuracy by up to 8590%85-90\% and final energy error by up to 90%90\% over from-scratch baselines on 6-, 8-, and 12-qubit molecular tasks. Together, these results establish that experience storage, sampling, and transfer are decisive levers for scalable, noise-robust quantum circuit optimization.

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