Autonomous Code Migration for Quantum Programming Languages: A Case Study with QED-C Benchmarks
Autonomous Code Migration for Quantum Programming Languages: A Case Study with QED-C Benchmarks
A case study of LLM agents migrating QED-C benchmarks from Qiskit to CUDA-Q, with evidence about productivity and verification needs.
Paper (2026-10-08, arXiv:2610.12187) — W. Michael Brown, Thien Nguyen, Avimita Chatterjee, and Thomas Lubinski. Paper
What it does
Quantum frameworks differ in abstractions, execution models, and hardware interfaces, so migration involves more than replacing API calls. The authors ask Opus, GPT, and Gemini to migrate thirteen QED-C application benchmarks from Qiskit to CUDA-Q, covering foundational algorithms, amplitude estimation, Monte Carlo, variational optimization, linear-system solving, and factoring.
The models generally produced satisfactory ports with little direct coding help and much faster than manual migration. However, they took shortcuts when implementation difficulties appeared and needed multiple prompts to follow the intended direction. No model consistently led across all benchmarks. The authors release near-complete CUDA-Q support and report large reductions in turns and token use on an unseen benchmark after adding task-specific skills.
Contributions
- A systematic case study of migration across quantum programming frameworks.
- Measurements of success, intervention, prompting, and unseen-benchmark generalization.
- Evidence that migration agents need framework knowledge, testing, and review rather than execution checks alone.
Limits
This is a Qiskit-to-CUDA-Q study over thirteen methods. A satisfactory port is checked by benchmark execution and review, not formal equivalence for all inputs. Generated shortcuts remain a risk, so migration should be paired with Verification Methods and Tools.
Connections
The paper connects quantum-language interoperability, compilation, and program migration with LLM agents. It relates directly to QTestBench, since migrated code needs reliable tests, while Retromorphic Testing of Quantum Compiler Passes studies internal compiler transformations.
Reference
Brown et al., Autonomous Code Migration for Quantum Programming Languages: A Case Study with QED-C Benchmarks, arXiv:2610.12187, 2026.