The development of variational quantum algorithms is crucial for the application of NISQ computers. Such algorithms require short quantum circuits, which are more amenable to implementation on near-term hardware, and many such methods have been developed. One of particular interest is the so-called the variational diagonalization method, which constitutes an important algorithmic subroutine, and it can be used directly for working with data encoded in quantum states. In particular, it can be applied to discern the features of quantum states, such as entanglement properties of a system, or in quantum machine learning algorithms. In this work, we tackle the problem of designing a very shallow quantum circuit, required in the quantum state diagonalization task, by utilizing reinforcement learning. To achieve this, we utilize a novel encoding method that can be used to tackle the problem of circuit depth optimization using a reinforcement learning approach. We demonstrate that our approach provides a solid approximation to the diagonalization task while using a small number of gates. The circuits proposed by the reinforcement learning methods are shallower than the standard variational quantum state diagonalization algorithm, and thus can be used in situations where the depth of quantum circuits is limited by the hardware capabilities.

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