CO-MAP: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to the Qubit Allocation Problem

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kulshrestha, Ankit, Liu, Xiaoyuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Kulshrestha, Ankit
Liu, Xiaoyuan
author_facet Kulshrestha, Ankit
Liu, Xiaoyuan
contents A quantum compiler is a critical piece in the quantum computing pipeline since it allows an abstract quantum circuit to be run on a physical quantum computer. One extremely important subproblem in quantum compilation is the generation of a logical to physical qubit mapping. Typically in quantum compilers this step is either implemented as a random or a heuristic based assignment that aims to minimize additional (SWAP) gate overhead in the quantum circuit. In this paper, we present an alternative approach to solving the qubit mapping problem. Specifically, we formulate the qubit mapping problem with a combinatorial optimization (CO) objective. We then present a method to find a solution to the CO problem by training a reinforcement learning (RL) policy. We also propose a local search based post-processing algorithm to further reduce the overhead. Our results show a dramatic improvement over conventional techniques in reducing the number of SWAPs. On different real world datasets like MQTBench and Queko circuits, our trained policy achieves a \textbf{65-85\%} reduction in SWAP overhead when compared to existing quantum compilers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_13638
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CO-MAP: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to the Qubit Allocation Problem
Kulshrestha, Ankit
Liu, Xiaoyuan
Quantum Physics
Machine Learning
A quantum compiler is a critical piece in the quantum computing pipeline since it allows an abstract quantum circuit to be run on a physical quantum computer. One extremely important subproblem in quantum compilation is the generation of a logical to physical qubit mapping. Typically in quantum compilers this step is either implemented as a random or a heuristic based assignment that aims to minimize additional (SWAP) gate overhead in the quantum circuit. In this paper, we present an alternative approach to solving the qubit mapping problem. Specifically, we formulate the qubit mapping problem with a combinatorial optimization (CO) objective. We then present a method to find a solution to the CO problem by training a reinforcement learning (RL) policy. We also propose a local search based post-processing algorithm to further reduce the overhead. Our results show a dramatic improvement over conventional techniques in reducing the number of SWAPs. On different real world datasets like MQTBench and Queko circuits, our trained policy achieves a \textbf{65-85\%} reduction in SWAP overhead when compared to existing quantum compilers.
title CO-MAP: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to the Qubit Allocation Problem
topic Quantum Physics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13638