quantum-computingQSPE: Enumerating Skeletal Quantum Programs for Quantum Library Testing
--> 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 an
