SPLASH 2026
Sun 4 - Fri 9 October 2026 Oakland, California, United States
co-located with SPLASH/ISSTA 2026

Monte Carlo methods are fundamental to finance, system verification, and scientific simulation, but converge slowly: achieving an additive error of $\epsilon$ requires $O(1/\epsilon^2)$ samples. Quantum Amplitude Estimation (QAE) offers a quadratic speedup by encoding the target probabilistic model into a quantum circuit. However, constructing such a circuit demands low-level quantum expertise, and existing tools for this task all sacrifice at least one of generality, usability, or efficiency.

To address these, we design QPPL (Quantum Probabilistic Programming Language), a simple imperative language, and a compiler that translates probabilistic programs into quantum circuits. The key insight is that the circuit construction amounts to specifying a probability distribution, precisely the task that \emph{probabilistic programming} addresses. QPPL achieves \emph{generality} by supporting joint distributions, conditional updates, dynamic probabilities, and real-valued expectations in a single language; \emph{usability} by offering a sequential, imperative syntax with named variables and direct arithmetic that hides all quantum details; and \emph{efficiency} by modularly compiling each construct into reversible circuit primitives, achieving scalable circuit synthesis. We prove that the compilation is semantics-preserving. On benchmarks spanning finance and probabilistic model checking, QPPL is the only tool that covers all benchmarks, while producing circuits with up to 8.8× fewer gates and 26× shallower depth than existing tools.