Efficient Quantum Control via Automatic Control Skips

Control of quantum operations is a crucial yet expensive construct for quantum computation. Efficient implementations of controlled operations often avoid applying control to certain subcircuits, which can significantly reduce the number of gates and overall circuit depth. However, these methods are specialized and circuits frequently need to be implemented manually. This paper presents a generic method for finding “skippable” patterns without having to tailor implementations for each algorithm. We prove that finding the optimal operations to be skipped is generally NP-hard. Nevertheless, sub-optimal, polynomial approximation algorithms that find skippable subcircuits can lead to over $50\mathrm{\%}$ improvement in circuit metrics for real-world applications.