How is knowledge stored in an LLM’s weights? We study this via layer pruning: if removing a certain layer does not affect model performance in common question-answering benchmarks, then the weights in that layer are not necessary for storing the knowledge needed to answer those questions. To find these unnecessary parameters, we identify the optimal block of layers to prune by considering similarity across layers; then, to “heal” the damage, we perform a small amount of finetuning. Surprisingly, with this method we find minimal degradation of performance until after a large fraction (up to half) of the layers are removed for some common open-weight models. From a scientific perspective, the robustness of these LLMs to the deletion of layers implies either that current pretraining methods are not properly leveraging the parameters in the deeper layers of the network or that the shallow layers play a critical role in storing knowledge. For our study, we use parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) methods, specifically quantization and Low Rank Adapters (QLoRA), such that each of our experiments can be performed on a single 40GB A100 GPU.

Distributed Quantum Computing (DQC) provides a scalable architecture by interconnecting multiple quantum processor units (QPUs).Among various DQC implementations, quantum data centers (QDCs) -where QPUs in different racks are connected through reconfigurable optical switch networks -are becoming feasible in the near term.However, the latency of cross-rack communications and dynamic switch reconfigurations poses unique challenges to communications in QDCs, significantly increasing the overall latency, thereby also reducing the overall fidelity.In this paper, we address these challenges by introducing a novel compiler that optimizes scheduling of communications across the program and network layers.Our evaluation shows that it reduces the overall latency by 8.02× over prior approaches with a small overhead and can be integrated with quantum error correction (QEC) to facilitate fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC).We have open-sourced our codes at https://zenodo.org/records/15377656.

With its significant security potential, the quantum internet is poised to revolutionize technologies like cryptography and communications. Although it boasts enhanced security over traditional networks, the quantum internet still encounters unique security challenges essential for safeguarding its Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA). This study explores these challenges by analyzing the vulnerabilities and the corresponding mitigation strategies across different layers of the quantum internet, including physical, link, network, and application layers. We assess the severity of potential attacks, evaluate the expected effectiveness of mitigation strategies, and identify vulnerabilities within diverse network configurations, integrating both classical and quantum approaches. Our research highlights the dynamic nature of these security issues and emphasizes the necessity for adaptive security measures. The findings underline the need for ongoing research into the security dimension of the quantum internet to ensure its robustness, encourage its adoption, and maximize its impact on society.

The photonic platform holds great promise for quantum computing. Nevertheless, the intrinsic probabilistic characteristic of its native fusion operations introduces substantial randomness into the computing process, posing significant challenges to achieving scalability and efficiency in program execution. In this paper, we introduce a randomness-aware compilation framework designed to concurrently achieve scalability and efficiency. Our approach leverages an innovative combination of offline and online optimization passes, with a novel intermediate representation serving as a crucial bridge between them. Through a comprehensive evaluation, we demonstrate that this framework significantly outperforms the most efficient baseline compiler in a scalable manner, opening up new possibilities for realizing scalable photonic quantum computing.

Chiplet architecture is an emerging architecture for quantum computing that could significantly increase qubit resources with its great scalability and modularity. However, as the computing scale increases, communication between qubits would become a more severe bottleneck due to the long routing distances. In this paper, we propose a multi-entry communication highway (MECH) mechanism to trade ancillary qubits for program concurrency, and build a compilation framework to efficiently manage and utilize the highway resources. Our evaluation shows that this framework significantly outperforms the baseline approach in both the circuit depth and the number of operations on typical quantum benchmarks. This implies a more efficient and less error-prone compilation of quantum programs.

In this paper, we propose OneQ, the first optimizing compilation framework for one-way quantum computation towards realistic photonic quantum architectures. Unlike previous compilation efforts for solid-state qubit technologies, our innovative framework addresses a unique set of challenges in photonic quantum computing. Specifically, this includes the dynamic generation of qubits over time, the need to perform all computation through measurements instead of relying on 1-qubit and 2-qubit gates, and the fact that photons are instantaneously destroyed after measurements. As pioneers in this field, we demonstrate the vast optimization potential of photonic one-way quantum computing, showcasing the remarkable ability of OneQ to reduce computing resource requirements by orders of magnitude.