Late Breaking Results: Hardware-Aware Compilation Reshapes Trainability in Variational Quantum Circuits
Abstract
Variational quantum circuits (VQCs) are typically evaluated at the logical design level when analyzing trainability. However, execution on real quantum devices requires hardware-aware compilation (transpilation) to satisfy qubit connectivity and native gate-set constraints. In this paper, we examine how transpilation can alter the gradient statistics. Using parameter-shift differentiation and gradient variance estimation, we compare logical and transpiled circuits across three representative ansatz families: EfficientSU2 (dense entanglement), TTN (tree tensor network), and RealAmplitudes (linear entanglement). We observe architecture-dependent trainability shifts where densely entangling circuits exhibit pronounced gradient reshaping in shallow regimes, structured tensor-network circuits remain comparatively robust, and linear architectures show mixed behavior. Deep circuits across all families display minimal sensitivity to hardware-aware compilation. These findings demonstrate that transpilation acts as an implicit structural transformation of the optimization landscape, motivating compilation-aware analysis and co-design for VQCs.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.16527,
title = {Late Breaking Results: Hardware-Aware Compilation Reshapes Trainability in Variational Quantum Circuits},
author = {Muhammad Kashif and Muhammad Shafique},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.16527},
year = {2026}
}