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arXiv:2106.01264 · Quantum Science and Technology

Experimental error mitigation using linear rescaling for variational quantum eigensolving with up to 20 qubits

Eliott N. Rosenberg, Paul Ginsparg, Peter L. McMahon

Published Nov 18, 2021• 19 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract Quantum computers have the potential to help solve a range of physics and chemistry problems, but noise in quantum hardware currently limits our ability to obtain accurate results from the execution of quantum-simulation algorithms. Various methods have been proposed to mitigate the impact of noise on variational algorithms, including several that model the noise as damping expectation values of observables. In this work, we benchmark various methods, including a new method proposed here. We compare their performance in estimating the ground-state energies of several instances of the 1D mixed-field Ising model using the variational-quantum-eigensolver algorithm with up to 20 qubits on two of IBM’s quantum computers. We find that several error-mitigation techniques allow us to recover energies to within 10% of the true values for circuits containing up to about 25 ansatz layers, where each layer consists of CNOT gates between all neighboring qubits and Y -rotations on all qubits.

DOI
10.1088/2058-9565/ac3b37

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Abstract Quantum computers have the potential to help solve a range of physics and chemistry problems, but noise in quantum hardware currently limits our ability to obtain accurate results from the execution of quantum-simulation algorithms. Various methods have been proposed to mitigate the impact of noise on variational algorithms, including several that model the noise as damping expectation values of observables. In this work, we benchmark various methods, including a new method proposed here. We compare their performance in estimating the ground-state energies of several instances of the 1D mixed-field Ising model using the variational-quantum-eigensolver algorithm with up to 20 qubits on two of IBM’s quantum computers. We find that several error-mitigation techniques allow us to recover energies to within 10% of the true values for circuits containing up to about 25 ansatz layers, where each layer consists of CNOT gates between all neighboring qubits and Y -rotations on all qubits.
Abstract We present a method to improve the convergence of variational algorithms based on hidden inverses (HIs) to mitigate coherent errors. In the context of error mitigation, this means replacing the hardware implementation of certain Hermitian gates with their inverses. Doing so results in noise cancellation and a more resilient quantum circuit. This approach improves performance in a variety of two-qubit error models where the noise operator also inverts with the gate inversion. We apply the mitigation scheme on superconducting quantum processors running the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithm to find the H 2 ground-state energy. When implemented on superconducting hardware we find that the mitigation scheme effectively reduces the energy fluctuations in the parameter learning path in VQE, reducing the number of iterations for a converged value. We also provide a detailed numerical simulation of VQE performance under different noise models and explore how HIs and randomized compiling affect the underlying loss landscape of the learning problem. These simulations help explain our experimental hardware outcomes, helping to connect lower-level gate performance to application-specific behavior in contrast to metrics like fidelity which often do not provide an intuitive insight into observed high level performance.
Variational quantum algorithms have emerged as a cornerstone of contemporary quantum algorithms research. Practical implementations of these algorithms, despite offering certain levels of robustness against systematic errors, show a decline in performance due to the presence of stochastic errors and limited coherence time. In this work, we develop a recipe for mitigating quantum gate errors using zero-noise extrapolation. We introduce an experimentally amenable method to control error strength in the circuit. We utilize the fact that gate errors in a physical quantum device are distributed inhomogeneously over different qubits and qubit pairs. As a result, one can achieve different circuit error sums based on the manner in which abstract qubits in the circuit are mapped to a physical device. We apply the proposed protocol to variational quantum algorithms and find that the estimated energy is approximately linear with respect to the circuit error sum (CES). Consequently, a linear fit through the energy-CES data, when extrapolated to zero CES, can approximate the energy estimated by a noiseless variational algorithm. We demonstrate this numerically and investigate the applicability range of the technique.
molecule, emphasizing practical implementation and performance on current quantum hardware. Our research presents a comparative study of HEA and UCCSD ansätze on noiseless and noisy simulations and implements VQE on recent IBM quantum computer noise models and a real quantum computer, IBM Fez, providing a fully functional code employing Qiskit 1.2. Our experiments confirm UCCSD's reliability in ideal conditions, while the HEA demonstrates greater robustness to hardware noise, achieving chemical accuracy on state-vector simulation (SVS). The results reveal that achieving ground-state energy within chemical accuracy is feasible without error mitigation during VQE convergence. We demonstrate that current quantum devices effectively optimize circuit parameters despite misestimating simulated energies. The SVS-evaluated energies provide a more accurate representation of the solution quality compared to QPU-estimated energy values, indicating that VQE converges to the correct ground state despite quantum noise. Our study also applies noise mitigation as a postprocessing technique, using zero-noise extrapolation (ZNE) on a real quantum computer. The detailed methodologies presented in this study, including Hamiltonian construction and Fermionic-to-qubit transformations, facilitate flexible adaptation of the VQE approach for various algorithm variants and across different levels of algorithmic implementation.
The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is a promising algorithm to demonstrate quantum advantage on near-term noisy-intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers. One central problem of VQE is the effect of noise, especially physical noise, on realistic quantum computers. We systematically study the effect of noise for the VQE algorithm by performing numerical simulations with various local noise models, including amplitude damping, dephasing, and depolarizing noise. We show that the ground state energy will deviate from the exact value as the noise probability increase, and typically, the noise will accumulate as the circuit depth increase. The results suggest that the noisy quantum system can remain entanglement at the noise level of NISQ devices by comparing the VQE solution with the mean-field solution for the many-body ground state problem. We build a noise model to capture the noise in a real quantum computer, and the corresponding numerical simulation is consistent with experimental results on IBM Quantum computers through cloud. Our work sheds new light on the practical research of noisy VQE, and the deep understanding of the noise effect of VQE will also help develop error mitigation techniques on near-term quantum computers.
Machine Learning-based quantum error mitigation (ML-QEM) has emerged as a promising approach for improving the performance of noisy quantum algorithms. However, existing ML-QEM methods often have restricted applicability to variational circuits and rely on inaccessible noiseless training data. In this work, we propose a practical ML-QEM protocol tailored to variational quantum algorithms, which generates training data by simulating (near-)Clifford circuits. This data is used for model selection and training, producing a mitigation model that can correct variational circuits with arbitrary parameters and transfer across different target Hamiltonians of similar structure. We benchmark the proposed method on the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) task for the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick Hamiltonian of up to n=12n=12n=12 qubits under various noise models, analyzing its effect on trainability and comparing its performance against standard Zero-Noise Extrapolation (ZNE). The results demonstrate consistent several-fold error suppression across all tested settings and superior performance over ZNE in the high-noise regime, providing evidence for the applicability of the proposed protocol to present-day NISQ processors.
As a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm, the variational quantum eigensolver is widely applied in quantum chemistry simulations, especially in computing the electronic structure of complex molecular systems. However, on existing noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, some factors such as quantum decoherence, measurement errors, and gate operation imprecisions are unavoidable. To overcome these challenges, this study proposes an efficient noise-mitigating variational quantum eigensolver for accurate computation of molecular ground state energies in noisy environments. We design the quantum circuit with reference to the structure of matrix product states and utilize it to pre-train the circuit parameters, which ensures circuit stability and mitigates fluctuations caused by initialization. We also employ zero-noise extrapolation to mitigate quantum noise and combine it with neural networks to improve the accuracy of the noise-fitting function, which significantly eliminates noise interference. Furthermore, we implement an intelligent grouping strategy for measuring Hamiltonian Pauli strings, which not only reduces measurement errors but also improves sampling efficiency. We perform numerical simulations to solve the ground state energy of the H4molecule by using MindSpore Quantum framework, and the results demonstrate that our algorithm can constrain noise errors within the range of O(10−2)∼O(10−1)\mathcal{O}\left( {{{10}^{ - 2}}} \right)\sim \mathcal{O}\left( {{{10}^{ - 1}}} \right)O(10−2)∼O(10−1), outperforming mainstream variational quantum eigensolvers. This work provides a new strategy for high-precision quantum chemistry calculations on near-term noisy quantum hardware.