Energy Accuracy Is Not Enough: A Structure-Aware Benchmark and Evaluation Protocol for Quantum Architecture Search

The paper introduces HamQASBench, a structure‑aware benchmark for quantum architecture search that includes eleven molecular Hamiltonians up to fourteen qubits, exact references, and a comprehensive evaluation protocol. The protocol combines energy accuracy, success rates, reference‑relative circuit cost, local entropy profiles for non‑degenerate targets, and state identification within degenerate ground subspaces. Experiments with five methods across four search paradigms show that energy‑only comparisons miss important differences, such as varying gate counts, distinct spin components in degenerate cases, and differing entanglement profiles, while still achieving chemical accuracy on a near‑product instance.

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• benchmarks