Quantum-Inspired Reinforcement Learning for Quantum Control

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) is considered a powerful technology with the potential to revolutionize quantum control. However, the application effectiveness of traditional RL is often limited by some insurmountable experimental conditions. Thus, developing new RL algorithms that can efficiently manipulate the quantum system dynamics is a crucial task. Prior research has shown that incorporating quantum mechanical properties into RL can improve learning performance. In this article, we consider the quantum control problem where only the target state can be accurately identified and introduce a quantum-inspired RL (QiRL) method. In particular, we propose a quantum-inspired exploration strategy to replace a commonly used $\epsilon $ -greedy strategy, as well as a quantum-inspired reward scheme to incentivize the learning agent. Numerical results on three quantum system control problems, i.e., one-qubit closed quantum system, two-level open quantum system, and many-qubit closed quantum system, verify the effectiveness of QiRL. Comparison results show that the proposed QiRL outperforms existing RL algorithms (deep Q-network and proximal policy optimization) in terms of stability and efficiency for solving quantum control problems.