Despite these advancements, QAOA's practical efficacy is challenged by the quantum coherence limits of modern quantum devices, as there is a ceiling on the allowable maximum circuit depth

One leading algorithmic paradigm on NISQ computers is theVariational Quantum Algorithm (VQA) with a few prominent examples like the Variational Quantum Eignensolver (VQE) [50], quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) [20], and more in [4]. Quantum machine learning isafast-developing emerging field (e.g., see the survey [5]) where variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) (e.g., see thesurvey[4]areoneofthemost promising candidates forNISQ applications.

Despite these advancements, QAOA's practical efficacy is challenged by the quantum coherence limits of modern quantum devices, as there is a ceiling on the allowable maximum circuit depth

Scientific progress is tightly coupled to the emergence of new research tools. Today, machine learning (ML)-especially deep learning (DL)-has become a transformative instrument for quantum science and technology. Owing to the intrinsic complexity of quantum systems, DL enables efficient exploration of large parameter spaces, extraction of patterns from experimental data, and data-driven guidance for research directions. These capabilities already support tasks such as refining quantum control protocols and accelerating the discovery of materials with targeted quantum properties, making ML/DL literacy an essential skill for the next generation of quantum scientists. At the same time, DL's power brings risks: models can overfit noisy data, obscure causal structure, and yield results with limited physical interpretability. Recognizing these limitations and deploying mitigation strategies is crucial for scientific rigor. These lecture notes provide a comprehensive, graduate-level introduction to DL for quantum applications, combining conceptual exposition with hands-on examples. Organized as a progressive sequence, they aim to equip readers to decide when and how to apply DL effectively, to understand its practical constraints, and to adapt AI methods responsibly to problems across quantum physics, chemistry, and engineering.

Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) are among the most promising approaches for leveraging near-term quantum hardware, yet their effectiveness strongly depends on the design of the underlying circuit ansatz, which is typically constructed with heuristic methods. In this work, we represent the synthesis of variational quantum circuits as a sequential decision-making problem, where gates are added iteratively in order to optimize an objective function, and we introduce two reinforcement learning-based methods, RLVQC Global and RLVQC Block, tailored to combinatorial optimization problems. RLVQC Block creates ansatzes that generalize the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), by discovering a two-qubits block that is applied to all the interacting qubit pairs. While RLVQC Global further generalizes the ansatz and adds gates unconstrained by the structure of the interacting qubits. Both methods adopt the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm and use empirical measurement outcomes as state observations to guide the agent. We evaluate the proposed methods on a broad set of QUBO instances derived from classical graph-based optimization problems. Our results show that both RLVQC methods exhibit strong results with RLVQC Block consistently outperforming QAOA and generally surpassing RLVQC Global. While RLVQC Block produces circuits with depth comparable to QAOA, the Global variant is instead able to find significantly shorter ones. These findings suggest that reinforcement learning methods can be an effective tool to discover new ansatz structures tailored for specific problems and that the most effective circuit design strategy lies between rigid predefined architectures and completely unconstrained ones, offering a favourable trade-off between structure and adaptability.

Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is one of the most promising candidates to achieve the quantum advantage in solving combinatorial optimization problems. The process of finding a good set of variational parameters in the QAOA circuit has proven to be challenging due to multiple factors, such as barren plateaus. As a result, there is growing interest in exploiting parameter transferability, where parameter sets optimized for one problem instance are transferred to another that could be more complex either to estimate the solution or to serve as a warm start for further optimization. But can we transfer parameters from one class of problems to another? Leveraging parameter sets learned from a well-studied class of problems could help navigate the less studied one, reducing optimization overhead and mitigating performance pitfalls. In this paper, we study whether pretrained QAOA parameters of MaxCut can be used as is or to warm start the Maximum Independent Set (MIS) circuits. Specifically, we design machine learning models to find good donor candidates optimized on MaxCut and apply their parameters to MIS acceptors. Our experimental results show that such parameter transfer can significantly reduce the number of optimization iterations required while achieving comparable approximation ratios.

Algorithms are the engine for reproducible problem-solving. We present a framework automating algorithm discovery by conceptualizing them as sequences of operations, represented as tokens. These computational tokens are chained using a grammar, enabling the formation of increasingly sophisticated procedures. Our ensemble Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) guided by reinforcement learning (RL) explores token chaining and drives the creation of new tokens. This methodology rediscovers, improves, and generates new algorithms that substantially outperform existing methods for strongly NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems and foundational quantum computing approaches such as Grover's and Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm. Operating at the computational rather than code-generation level, our framework produces algorithms that can be tailored specifically to problem instances, not merely classes.

HIV epidemiological data is increasingly complex, requiring advanced computation for accurate cluster detection and forecasting. We employed quantum-accelerated machine learning to analyze HIV prevalence at the ZIP-code level using AIDSVu and synthetic SDoH data for 2022. Our approach compared classical clustering (DBSCAN, HDBSCAN) with a quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA), developed a hybrid quantum-classical neural network for HIV prevalence forecasting, and used quantum Bayesian networks to explore causal links between SDoH factors and HIV incidence. The QAOA-based method achieved 92% accuracy in cluster detection within 1.6 seconds, outperforming classical algorithms. Meanwhile, the hybrid quantum-classical neural network predicted HIV prevalence with 94% accuracy, surpassing a purely classical counterpart. Quantum Bayesian analysis identified housing instability as a key driver of HIV cluster emergence and expansion, with stigma exerting a geographically variable influence. These quantum-enhanced methods deliver greater precision and efficiency in HIV surveillance while illuminating critical causal pathways. This work can guide targeted interventions, optimize resource allocation for PrEP, and address structural inequities fueling HIV transmission.

The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is a general-purpose algorithm for combinatorial optimization that has been a promising avenue for near-term quantum advantage. In this paper, we analyze the performance of the QAOA on the spiked tensor model, a statistical estimation problem that exhibits a large computational-statistical gap classically. We prove that the weak recovery threshold of 1 -step QAOA matches that of 1 -step tensor power iteration. Additional heuristic calculations suggest that the weak recovery threshold of p -step QAOA matches that of p -step tensor power iteration when p is a fixed constant. This further implies that multi-step QAOA with tensor unfolding could achieve, but not surpass, the asymptotic classical computation threshold \Theta(n {(q-2)/4}) for spiked q -tensors.

Y et, their performance and scalability often hinge on effective parameter optimization, which remains nontrivial due to rugged energy landscapes and hardware noise. In this work, we introduce a quantum meta-learning framework that combines quantum neural networks, specifically Quantum Long Short-T erm Memory (QLSTM) architectures, with QAOA. By training the QLSTM optimizer on smaller graph instances, our approach rapidly generalizes to larger, more complex problems, substantially reducing the number of iterations required for convergence. Through comprehensive benchmarks on Max-Cut and Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model instances, we demonstrate that QLSTM-based optimizers converge faster and achieve higher approximation ratios compared to classical baselines, thereby offering a robust pathway toward scalable quantum optimization in the NISQ era.