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A Practical Specification Language for Automatic Quantum Program Verification (Technical Report)

Logic in Computer Science 2026-05-08 v1 Formal Languages and Automata Theory

Abstract

Hoare-style verification provides a principled foundation for reasoning about the correctness of quantum programs, but existing approaches do not allow fully automatic verification. While automata-based verification scales well when specifications are given directly as automata, prior frameworks incur exponential blow-up when translating high-level set-based assertions into automata, which severely limits practicality. We introduce an extended set-based specification language and a specification-to-automata translation algorithm whose complexity is linear in the number of qubits, enabled by controlled automaton construction and qubit reordering. The resulting compact automata enable fully automatic Hoare-style verification of fixed-qubit quantum programs at previously infeasible scales, while substantially improving expressiveness without compromising efficiency.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.05786,
  title  = {A Practical Specification Language for Automatic Quantum Program Verification (Technical Report)},
  author = {Wei-Lun Tsai and Yu-Fang Chen and Ondřej Lengál},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.05786},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

a research paper submitted to CAV 2026