LLM-Guided Initialization for Accelerated Hybrid Quantum-Classical Medical Image Classification

We introduce a hybrid quantum-classical pipeline, based on neutral-atom reservoir computing, for medical image classification, focusing on the binary classification task of polyp detection. To deal effectively with the high dimensionality, we integrate a guided auto-encoder. This pipeline learns compact and discriminative representations of image data that are also well-suited for quantum reservoir computing. A key challenge in such systems is the non-differentiable nature of quantum measurements, which creates a 'gradient barrier' for standard training. We overcome this barrier by incorporating a differentiable surrogate model that emulates the quantum layer, enabling end-to-end backpropagation through the entire system. This guided training process is jointly optimized for classification accuracy and for faithful image recovery from the auto-encoder. The learned latent representations are encoded as pulse detuning parameters within a Rydberg Hamiltonian, and quantum embeddings are subsequently obtained through expectation values. These embeddings are then passed to a linear classifier. Our simulations show that this method outperforms some traditional approaches that use PCA or unguided autoencoders. We also conduct ablation studies to assess the impact of various quantum and training parameters, demonstrating the robustness and flexibility of our proposed pipeline for real-world medical imaging applications, even in the current NISQ era.

Quantum computing provides a powerful paradigm for representing and transforming high-dimensional information through superposition, entanglement, and measurement-induced nonlinear features. While current quantum hardware is not yet practical for direct large-scale vision-language model (VLM) inference, simulated quantum computation can be used during model construction to generate structured parameters for compact classical AI systems. We build RiverONE, a lightweight vision-language model for quantum calibration plot understanding, using simulated quantum computation. It employs a specialized visual encoder and an InternVL-based language backbone. To compensate for compression-induced information loss, we introduce quantum-generated parameters, which are materialized as classical tensors after training. This allows RiverONE to run entirely on classical GPUs at inference time, with no quantum hardware or runtime quantum simulation. With approximately 1.9 billion parameters, RiverONE achieves at least 95% of the performance of NVIDIA Ising Calibration 1 on quantum calibration plot understanding tasks while using less than 10% of its parameter count. These results suggest that simulated quantum computation can serve as a practical construction-stage mechanism for building lightweight, knowledge-intensive scientific VLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/THeWakeSystems/RiverOne.

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.