Quantum Monte Carlo Estimation via Probabilistic Programming
Seungmin Jeon, Jaeho Choi, Jonguk Jeon, Kanguk Lee, Kyeongmin Cho, Sukyoung Ryu, Jeehoon Kang
Abstract
Monte Carlo methods are fundamental to finance, system verification, and scientific simulation, but converge slowly: achieving an additive error of є requires O (1/є 2 ) samples. Quantum Amplitude Estimation (QAE) offers a quadratic speedup by encoding the target probabilistic model into a quantum circuit. However, constructing such a circuit demands low-level quantum expertise, and existing tools for this task all sacrifice at least one of generality, usability, or efficiency. To address these, we design QPPL (Quantum Probabilistic Programming Language), a simple imperative language, and a compiler that translates probabilistic programs into quantum circuits. The key insight is that the circuit construction amounts to specifying a probability distribution, precisely the task that probabilistic programming addresses. QPPL achieves generality by supporting joint distributions, conditional updates, dynamic probabilities, and real-valued expectations in a single language; usability by offering a sequential, imperative syntax with named variables and direct arithmetic that hides all quantum details; and efficiency by modularly compiling each construct into reversible circuit primitives, achieving scalable circuit synthesis. We prove that the compilation is semantics-preserving. On benchmarks spanning finance and probabilistic model checking, QPPL is the only tool that covers all benchmarks, while producing circuits with up to 8.8× fewer gates and 26× shallower depth than existing tools.
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