SPA-QNAS: Improving Search Efficiency and Stability in Evolutionary Quantum Neural Architecture Search

Quantum neural architecture search (QNAS) has emerged as a promising approach for automatically designing parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) for near-term quantum machine learning tasks. However, quantum evolutionary algorithm (QEA)-based QNAS methods often suffer from slow distribution concentration and insufficient update adaptivity in high-dimensional discrete search spaces, which limits both search efficiency and final model performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes Structural Probability Adaptive Quantum Neural Architecture Search (SPA-QNAS), a search-dynamics-enhanced QNAS method built upon the EQNAS benchmark framework. SPA-QNAS introduces two complementary mechanisms into the QPV-driven evolutionary search loop: Structural Probability Enhancement (SPE) and Adaptive Evolutionary Control (AEC). SPE reinforces elite structural decisions to accelerate the concentration of the structural sampling distribution toward high-fitness regions, while AEC adaptively regulates the rotation updates of non-elite individuals according to fitness feedback, thereby improving update stability and suppressing ineffective disturbances. Under the same search space, circuit template, and quantum resource budget as EQNAS, SPA-QNAS is evaluated on the MNIST and Warship benchmark datasets. Experimental results across multiple independent runs demonstrate that SPA-QNAS achieves higher classification accuracy and more stable performance compared with EQNAS. In representative experiments, SPA-QNAS achieves classification accuracies of 99.42% on MNIST and 85.33% on Warship under the same search space and quantum resource budget as EQNAS. These results indicate that improving QPV-based evolutionary update dynamics is an effective way to enhance the stability and robustness of QNAS under fixed quantum resource constraints.