Evaluating analytic gradients on quantum hardware

An important application for near-term quantum computing lies in optimization tasks, with applications ranging from quantum chemistry and drug discovery to machine learning. In many settings, most prominently in so-called parametrized or variational algorithms, the objective function is a result of hybrid quantum-classical processing. To optimize the objective, it is useful to have access to exact gradients of quantum circuits with respect to gate parameters. This paper shows how gradients of expectation values of quantum measurements can be estimated using the same, or almost the same, architecture that executes the original circuit. It generalizes previous results for qubit-based platforms, and proposes…