Papers › PennyLane: Automatic differentiation of hybrid quantum-classical computations

PennyLane: Automatic differentiation of hybrid quantum-classical computations

12 Nov 2018arXiv:1811.04968archive 2025-07-28

Ville Bergholm, Josh Izaac, Maria Schuld, Christian Gogolin, Shahnawaz Ahmed, Vishnu Ajith, M. Sohaib Alam, Guillermo Alonso-Linaje, B. AkashNarayanan, Ali Asadi, Juan Miguel Arrazola, Utkarsh Azad, Sam Banning, Carsten Blank, Thomas R Bromley, Benjamin A. Cordier, Jack Ceroni, Alain Delgado, Olivia Di Matteo, Amintor Dusko, Tanya Garg, Diego Guala, Anthony Hayes, Ryan Hill, Aroosa Ijaz, Theodor Isacsson, David Ittah, Soran Jahangiri, Prateek Jain, Edward Jiang, Ankit Khandelwal, Korbinian Kottmann, Robert A. Lang, Christina Lee, Thomas Loke, Angus Lowe, Keri McKiernan, Johannes Jakob Meyer, J. A. Montañez-Barrera, Romain Moyard, Zeyue Niu, Lee James O'Riordan, Steven Oud, Ashish Panigrahi, Chae-Yeun Park, Daniel Polatajko, Nicolás Quesada, Chase Roberts, Nahum Sá, Isidor Schoch, Borun Shi, Shuli Shu, Sukin Sim, Arshpreet Singh, Ingrid Strandberg, Jay Soni, Antal Száva, Slimane Thabet, Rodrigo A. Vargas-Hernández, Trevor Vincent, Nicola Vitucci, Maurice Weber, David Wierichs, Roeland Wiersema, Moritz Willmann, Vincent Wong, Shaoming Zhang, Nathan Killoran

PennyLane is a Python 3 software framework for differentiable programming of quantum computers. The library provides a unified architecture for near-term quantum computing devices, supporting both qubit and continuous-variable paradigms. PennyLane's core feature is the ability to compute gradients of variational quantum circuits in a way that is compatible with classical techniques such as backpropagation. PennyLane thus extends the automatic differentiation algorithms common in optimization and machine learning to include quantum and hybrid computations. A plugin system makes the framework compatible with any gate-based quantum simulator or hardware. We provide plugins for hardware providers including the Xanadu Cloud, Amazon Braket, and IBM Quantum, allowing PennyLane optimizations to be run on publicly accessible quantum devices. On the classical front, PennyLane interfaces with accelerated machine learning libraries such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, JAX, and Autograd. PennyLane can be used for the optimization of variational quantum eigensolvers, quantum approximate optimization, quantum machine learning models, and many other applications.

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