Research Sketches and Thoughts

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I am still new to quantum computing, but I want to do research in quantum computing, visualization for quantum computing and develop tools for quantum software development.

  • Quantum Computing (QC)
    • Quantum Simulation
    • Quantum Software Development (QSD)
    • Quantum Machine Learning (QML)
    • Agents for QC and QSD
  • Visualization (Vis)
    • Large Language Models (LLMs) and Agents for Vis
  • Visualization for QC

three_pillars

Knowns and Unknowns

Quantum Computing Concepts

Walking through Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Nielson and Chuang.

Known knowns:

  • Bloch Sphere
  • Qubit Math Formulation
  • Basic quantum gates

Known unknowns:

  • Quantum Algorithms
  • Visualization techniques for quantum computing
  • What is variational quantum circuits?

Quantum Computing Toolkits

Known knowns:

  • Some basics of QASM

Known unknowns:

  • Any concrete knowledge about any of quantum computing frameworks

Research Proposal WIP

Rough Ideas

Quantum Software Development:

  • Quantum Simulator:
    • I know how to write CUDA kernels
    • but what are SOTA simulation algorithms? Need research 📌
  • LLM agents:
    • I know how to develop LLM agents
    • No open benchmarks for testing LLM's understanding of quantum computing
      • should make one first?
    • There are techniques to train LLMs based on RL and rewards
      • For a quantum code assistant, maybe we can train it with rewards from a quantum simulator
    • Quantum Software Stack? 📌
      • what does a quantum compiler do?
      • Any other components in this stack?

Visualization with LLMs / NL2VIS:

  • Personalized interactive visualization with LLMs
    • Visualization Generation with Large Language Models: An Evaluation
      • this is a "survey", published on Jan 2024, a bit outdated
      • use Vega-Lite, a json-based DSL
      • no reasoning models (like o1) examined
      • reference: Chat2VIS 📌
      • reference: LIDA 📌
    • componentize the current algorithm-specific and generic visualization tools?
  • The criteria of how well a LLM did visualization seem to be a research question
    • Lack of benchmarks and evals? 📌
      • NL2SQL is one
      • LIDA has developed some evals
      • nvBench
      • Eval with Multimodal capability
    • RFT on visualization?

Visualization for quantum computing:

Quantum Machine Learning:

Autoregressive sampling (GPT-style sequential generation) has striking similarities to quantum circuits:

qml

Goals

All together, we should develop a holistic solution for quantum software dev:

  • Visualization tools for understand a quantum program
  • LLM agents to:
    • understand the concepts of quantum computing
    • understand a quantum program with personalized visualization
    • help develop new quantum algorithms
    • maybe develop quantum software autonomously
  • Quantum software stack, including:
    • IDE with DSL server
    • Debugger with visualization
    • toolchains for compiling and running a quantum program:
      • compiler
      • simulator
      • connector to physical quantum computers

Besides, an agent for visualization should generalize to Data Analytics and Visualization.

Misc