QSPE: Enumerating Skeletal Quantum Programs for Quantum Library Testing
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Quantum Physics arXiv:2602.00024 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 17 Jan 2026] Title:QSPE: Enumerating Skeletal Quantum Programs for Quantum Library Testing Authors:Jiaming Ye, Fuyuan Zhang, Shangzhou Xia, Xiaoyu Guo, Xiongfei Wu, Jianjun Zhao, Yinxing Xue View a PDF of the paper titled QSPE: Enumerating Skeletal Quantum Programs for Quantum Library Testing, by Jiaming Ye and 6 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:The rapid advancement of quantum computing has led to the development of various quantum libraries, empowering compilation, simulation, and hardware backend interfaces. However, ensuring the correctness of these libraries remains a fundamental challenge due to the lack of mature testing methodologies. The state-of-the-art tools often rely on domain-specific configurations and expert knowledge, which limits their accessibility and scalability in practice. Furthermore, although these tools demonstrate strong performance, they adopt measurement-based for output validation in testing, which makes them produce false positive reports. To alleviate these limitations, we propose QSPE, a practical approach that follows the differential testing principle and extends the existing approach, SPE, for quantum libraries. QSPE is fully automated, requiring no pre-set configurations or domain expertise, and can effectively generate a large set of diverse program variants that comprehensively explore the quantum compilation space. To mitigate the possible false positive reports, we propose statevector-based validation as an alternative to measurement-based validation. In our experiments, the QSPE approach demonstrates remarkable effectiveness in generating 22,770 program variants across multiple quantum computing platforms. By avoiding $\alpha$-equivalence at the quantum and classical program wise, QSPE can reduce redundant generation and save more than 90\% of execution cost. Finally, the statevector-based validation method assists QSPE to reduce false alarms and effectively detects 708 miscompilations across multiple quantum libraries. Notably, 81 of the discovered bugs have been officially approved and acknowledged by the Qiskit development team, demonstrating the practical impact of our approach. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Software Engineering (cs.SE) Cite as: arXiv:2602.00024 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2602.00024v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.00024 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Jiaming Ye [view email] [v1] Sat, 17 Jan 2026 08:10:40 UTC (661 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled QSPE: Enumerating Skeletal Quantum Programs for Quantum Library Testing, by Jiaming Ye and 6 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-02 Change to browse by: cs cs.SE References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)