IterTestQ: Assembly-Level, Cross-Platform Testing of Quantum Computing Platforms

Abstract

Quantum computing platforms are susceptible to quantum-specific bugs, such as incorrectly ordering qubits or incorrectly implementing quantum abstractions. These bugs are difficult to detect and require specialized expertise. The field faces challenges due to a fragmented landscape of platforms and rapid development cycles that often prioritize new features over thorough testing, severely hindering the reliability of quantum software. To address these challenges, we present IterTestQ, a novel cross-platform testing approach for quantum computing platforms. The key technical contribution is our novel ITE process, which generates equivalent quantum programs by iteratively (I)mporting them into platform-specific representations, (T)ransforming the program via optimizations and gate conversions, and (E)xporting the program again. To transfer programs across platforms and test cross-platform consistency, IterTestQ leverages QASM, an assembly-level representation supported by most platforms. The approach uses a crash oracle to detect failures during cross-platform transformations and an equivalence oracle to validate the semantic consistency of the generated assembly programs, which are expected to be equivalent by construction. We evaluate IterTestQ on widely-used quantum computing platforms, including Qiskit, PennyLane, Pytket, BQSKit, and Cirq, revealing 23 bugs, 17 of which are already confirmed or fixed. Our results also demonstrate that IterTestQ complements existing quantum fuzzers (covering tens of thousands of otherwise uncovered lines), is efficient (with 0.00089 seconds per generated program), and that the ITE process is crucial for its effectiveness.