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

2026-05-07

AI Summary

Existing Hoare-style verification methods for quantum programs struggle to achieve full automation, primarily due to the exponential blowup in translating high-level set-based assertions into automata. This work proposes an extended set-based specification language together with a novel translation algorithm whose complexity scales linearly with the number of qubits. By integrating controlled automaton construction and qubit reordering techniques, the approach achieves—for the first time—linear scalability in translating specifications to automata with respect to qubit count. The method substantially enhances expressiveness while maintaining computational efficiency, thereby overcoming the scalability barrier that has long hindered automated verification of quantum programs. As a result, it enables fully automatic Hoare-style verification of large-scale quantum programs previously deemed infeasible.

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.

Problem

• quantum program verification
• Hoare-style verification
• automata-based verification
• specification language
• exponential blow-up

Innovation

• quantum program verification
• Hoare logic
• automata-based verification
• specification language
• qubit reordering