XGSwap: eXtreme Gradient boosting Swap for Routing in NISQ Devices

Abstract: In the current landscape of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing, the inherent noise presents significant challenges to achieving high-fidelity long-range entanglement. Furthermore, this challenge is amplified by the limited connectivity of current superconducting devices, necessitating state permutations to establish long-distance entanglement. Traditionally, graph methods are used to satisfy the coupling constraints of a given architecture by routing states along the shortest undirected path between qubits. In this work, we introduce a gradient boosting machine learning model to predict the fidelity of alternative--potentially longer--routing paths to improve fidelity. This model was trained on 4050 random CNOT gates ranging in length from 2 to 100+ qubits. The experiments were all executed on ibm_quebec, a 127-qubit IBM Quantum System One. Through more than 200+ tests run on actual hardware, our model successfully identified higher fidelity paths in approximately 23% of cases.