arXiv:2608.20660v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simulating a continuous-time quantum walk (CTQW) on a graph in the circuit model of quantum computing requires decomposing its Hamiltonian into terms that can be Trotterized into hardware-native gates. We consider two such decompositions: the standard Pauli decomposition and the recently introduced matching decomposition. Prior work suggests that the matching decomposition uses fewer CX gates on sparse graphs, while the Pauli decomposition uses fewer on denser graphs. Since CX gates dominate error and runtime on current hardware, we train machine learning models to predict, for a given graph, which of the two decompositions produces the smaller CX gate count. We train and evaluate on the complete population of all 11,117 connected eight-vertex graphs from Brendan McKay's database, so the class balance and overlap are measured directly rather than estimated. We use twelve features: ten topological properties of the graph and two that count the terms the Pauli and matching decompositions produce (n_Pauli and n_match), both computable without transpiling the simulation circuit. Standard topological properties alone provide little predictive power. Instead, the dominant signal comes from n_Pauli, a property of the Hamiltonian decomposition rather than an intrinsic property of the graph; degree variance is the only other feature that carries signal. Across a range of models the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) falls in a narrow band, from 0.569 untuned to 0.593 after tuning, so no single architecture stands out. We adopt a single-hidden-layer neural network at MCC 0.593. Applied frozen to a held-out, class-balanced test set of larger graphs (up to 256 vertices) from structured and Erdos-Renyi families, the model transfers, with MCC rising from 0.785 at N=8 to 1 at N>=64.
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