Bootstrapping shallow circuits

Abstract: Recently, a polynomial time classical algorithm has been found for learning the shallow representation of a unitary $U$ acting on $n$-qubits, by learning local inversions and then sewing them back together with ancilla qubits and SWAP gates. In this work, we bootstrap local inversion learning (LIL) to optimize quantum circuit depth by learning shallow representations for its sub-unitaries. We recursively cut circuits and apply the LIL algorithm to replace sub-circuits with their shallow representations, if it can be found by the algorithm. If not, we keep cutting until the optimization terminates, either by finding shallow representations or by reaching constant-depth sub-circuits. By replacing sub-circuits with their shallow representations, we hope to obtain some compression of the quantum circuit. Due to the binary search structure, the optimization algorithm has time complexity logarithmic in the depth of the original given circuit.