Quantum Mutant Equivalence via Transpilation

2023-07-20 · Source: cs.SE updates on arXiv.org · Field: Technology & Digital — Software Development & Engineering, Emerging Technologies & Innovation · Depth: Expert, long

Summary

Transpiler-Based Equivalence (TBE) is a lightweight approach designed to identify equivalent quantum mutants, addressing a critical challenge in quantum software mutation testing. The equivalent mutant problem arises when syntactically different but semantically identical mutants distort test suite quality scores. A previous large-scale study generated 723,079 mutants from real-world quantum circuits, finding 348,299 (48.2%) survived tests, making their equivalence unclear. TBE tackles this by transpiling original and mutated circuits under identical configurations and comparing their resulting OpenQASM code. Evaluated on 348,299 surviving mutants from the MQT benchmark, TBE identified 29,536 (32.1%) of 92,011 true equivalent mutants with 100% precision and 82% accuracy. This method is conservative, producing no false positives, and significantly reduces computational cost, requiring about 1/445 of the execution time and 1/2 of the memory compared to state-vector simulation.

Key takeaway

For research scientists evaluating quantum test suite quality, integrating Transpiler-Based Equivalence (TBE) into your workflow can significantly improve mutation score accuracy. TBE precisely identifies a substantial subset of equivalent quantum mutants, reducing wasted testing effort. This lightweight approach requires considerably less computational resources than state-vector simulation. You should consider TBE to filter out unkillable mutants before extensive analysis, especially for larger circuits where state-vector methods are impractical.

Key insights

Transpiler-Based Equivalence (TBE) efficiently identifies a subset of equivalent quantum mutants by comparing transpiled OpenQASM representations.

Principles

• Equivalent mutants distort mutation scores.
• Transpiler-based comparison offers high precision.
• Scalability is tied to underlying transpiler.

Method

TBE transpiles original and mutated quantum circuits using the same configuration (basis gates, optimization level, seed) and compares their resulting OpenQASM code for identity.

In practice

• Use TBE to filter quantum mutants.
• Apply TBE before extensive simulation.
• Explore different transpiler configurations.

Topics

• Quantum Mutation Testing
• Equivalent Mutants
• Quantum Transpilation
• OpenQASM
• Quantum Software Engineering
• Qiskit Framework

Best for: AI Scientist, Research Scientist

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Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by cs.SE updates on arXiv.org.