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arXiv · 2609.38883

Toward Quantum Software Automation: A Quantum-Aware Harness for LLM-Guided Evolution

Lily Jiaxin Wan·Deming Chen·Klara Nahrstedt·Bo Chen
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Abstract

Quantum software is critical for improving the efficiency and reliability of scarce quantum hardware. However, its design still relies heavily on ad-hoc, handcrafted heuristics that are often suboptimal and quickly become obsolete as quantum hardware evolves. LLM-guided evolutionary search offers a promising way to automatically explore complex software designs, but existing search frameworks lack the quantum-specific support needed for efficient evolution: verification is expensive, feedback is sparse, and heterogeneous quantum programs require different optimization objectives. In this paper, we present QSA, a quantum-aware harness for LLM-guided evolutionary search toward automating quantum software design. QSA equips the search with three forms of quantum-specific guidance: an evolution-hardness-guided coreset and approximate scoring to reduce verification cost, static and snapshot analyses to provide fine-grained execution context, and task-specific rewards for compiler passes and runtime policies. We evaluate QSA on the IBM Quantum platform across three benchmark suites. For multiprogramming, QSA improves QPU utilization by 4.2%-9.5% and Hellinger fidelity by 15.2%-19.5% over the state of the art. For error mitigation, QSA reduces mitigation time by at least 96.8% while achieving comparable or better fidelity. These gains require only $6.9 in LLM API cost over 11.3 hours.

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Lily Jiaxin Wan, Deming Chen, Klara Nahrstedt, Bo Chen. 2026-09-30. Toward Quantum Software Automation: A Quantum-Aware Harness for LLM-Guided Evolution. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38883

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