An Application of Reinforcement Learning for Minor Embedding in Quantum Annealing

Research in the Quantum Computing (QC) field has been soaring thanks to the latest developments and wider availability of real hardware. The strong interest in this technology has naturally spurred a contamination with the Machine Learning (ML) field. Both quantum methods to perform ML and ML methods to support quantum computation has been developed. A largely diffused QC paradigm is that of Quantum Annealers, machines that can rapidly search for solutions to optimization problems. Their sparse qubit structure, however, requires to search for a mapping between the problem’s and the hardware’s graphs before computation. This is a NP-hard combinatorial optimization task in itself, called Minor Embedding. In this work, we aim at developing and assessing the capabilities of Reinforcement Learning to perform this task.