Reinforcement Learning-Assisted Quantum Simulation of Many-Body Excited States and Real-Time Dynamics
Abstract The computation of electronic excited states and real-time quantum dynamics of many-Fermion systems is among the most promising applications of near-term quantum computing. In this work, we generalize the reinforcement learning contracted quantum eigensolver (RL-CQE), previously developed for ground-state problems, to electronic excited states and real-time quantum dynamics, in which a deep Q-network agent adaptively selects the two-body operators at each iteration, yielding more compact ansätze and improved robustness with respect to critical hyperparameters. A key feature of the algorithm is a scalable state representation based on the ACSE residuals, whose dimension grows with the one-particle basis but remains independent of the number of targeted excited states. We also show the equivalence of sign-free qubit operators in the excited-state and time-evolution settings, extending a result previously established for ground-state problems. Our RL-CQE for time evolution derives from a constant-scaling ansatz that represents the wave function with a fixed number of unitary transformations independent of simulation time, enabled by the shared unitary structure of the purified ensemble treatment of excited states. Benchmarks on chemical systems demonstrate chemical accuracy with minimal operator counts across a range of bond lengths.