{
  "abstract": "Quantum architecture search for molecular ground-state estimation is commonly evaluated through energy accuracy, which does not describe circuit cost or the physical properties of the prepared state. We introduce HamQASBench, a structure-aware benchmark comprising eleven molecular Hamiltonians of up to fourteen qubits, selected using Hamiltonian and target-state properties and supplied with exact references. Its evaluation protocol combines energy accuracy and success rates with reference-relative circuit cost, local entropy profiles for non-degenerate targets, and state identification within degenerate ground subspaces. Experiments with five methods spanning four search paradigms reveal differences hidden by energy-only comparisons. On a near-product instance under the shallow search budget, the best outputs of all five methods reach chemical accuracy while using between two and sixty-two gates. Equal-energy outputs on a degenerate instance occupy distinct spin components. Local entropy profiles distinguish inaccurate outputs and show that entangling-gate counts need not reflect realized entanglement. Across the molecular instance ladder, product-state outputs can meet or miss chemical accuracy, motivating interpretation of success alongside target-state properties. These results support retaining energy as the task-success criterion while using circuit-cost and state diagnostics for more informative comparisons. The benchmark instances, references, evaluation implementation, and per-run data are released for reuse.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": "2607.04845",
  "author_total": 8,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Jiayang Niu"
    },
    {
      "name": "Akib Karim"
    },
    {
      "name": "Yan Wang"
    },
    {
      "name": "Jie Li"
    },
    {
      "name": "Ke Deng"
    },
    {
      "name": "Azadeh Alavi"
    },
    {
      "name": "Muhammad Usman"
    },
    {
      "name": "Yongli Ren"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/8p4e85yq6n56q.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.48550/arxiv.2607.04845",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "8p4e85yq6n56q",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04845",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": "CC0-1.0",
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "arxiv",
      "cs.AI"
    ],
    [
      "arxiv",
      "quant-ph"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "1702|Quantum Computing Algorithms and Architecture"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7167593753",
  "pdf_url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.04845",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-09-11",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/8p4e85yq6n56q.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:21:25Z",
      "native_id": "2607.04845",
      "source": "arxiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04845"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "physics",
      "origin": "arxiv:quant-ph",
      "subfield": "quantum"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Energy Accuracy Is Not Enough: A Structure-Aware Benchmark and Evaluation Protocol for Quantum Architecture Search",
  "title_text": "Energy Accuracy Is Not Enough: A Structure-Aware Benchmark and Evaluation Protocol for Quantum Architecture Search",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:21:25Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/8p4e85yq6n56q",
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "versions": []
}