QCIVET: A Quantum--Classical Pipeline Integrity Framework with Contract-Based Subtype Verification and Hash-Chained Audit Traces

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13109v1
• Date: Wed, 13 May 2026 07:19:44 GMT
• Title: QCIVET: A Quantum--Classical Pipeline Integrity Framework with Contract-Based Subtype Verification and Hash-Chained Audit Traces
• Abstract summary: We propose QCIVET, a contract-based integrity-verification framework for quantum pipelines.<n>We prove soundness under the diamond-norm distance between quantum channels, conditional completeness for informationally complete observable families, and compositionality under inheritance chains.<n> QCIVET is instantiated on three representative applications: variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) for drug discovery, quantum-assisted fraud detection, and customer-side auditing of cloud QPU services.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Hybrid quantum--classical pipelines increasingly support applications such as drug discovery, fraud detection, and cloud quantum processing unit (QPU) auditing, yet existing integrity-verification methods remain largely classical and fail to capture quantum-stage behaviour. We propose QCIVET, a contract-based integrity-verification framework that models a hybrid pipeline as a sequence of stages with explicit specifications and audits it at both syntactic and semantic levels. Syntactic integrity is enforced through a hash-chained audit trail with optional external anchoring, while semantic integrity at quantum stages is verified using a calibrated observable-deviation test grounded in the behavioural-subtyping discipline of Liskov and Wing. We prove soundness under the diamond-norm distance between quantum channels, conditional completeness for informationally complete observable families, and compositionality under inheritance chains. We further identify a class of Z-only-sneaky overrides that evade weak single-Pauli contracts but are exposed by multi-Pauli contracts. The framework is evaluated under calibration-derived noise models from IBM Quantum Eagle r3 and Heron r2 processors, and the subtype-separation protocol is validated end-to-end on a real ibm_fez (Heron r2) processor. QCIVET is instantiated on three representative applications: variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) for drug discovery, quantum-assisted fraud detection, and customer-side auditing of cloud QPU services. The reference implementation, including a real-time verification engine with sub-millisecond per-stage commit latency, is released as open source.

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