Quantum error mitigation is expected to play a crucial role in the practical applications of quantum machines for the foreseeable future. Thus it is important to put the numerous quantum error mitigation schemes proposed under a coherent framework that can highlight their underlying connections while providing guidance for their practical performance. In this article, we construct a general framework named linear quantum error mitigation that includes most of the state-of-the-art quantum error mitigation schemes. Within the framework, quantum error mitigation can be effectively viewed as extracting the error-mitigated state out of the noisy state, which introduces a new metric called extraction rate for indicating the cost-effectiveness of a given mitigation scheme. Using the framework, we have derived and compared the extraction rate, improvement in the fidelity and sampling overhead across various mitigation schemes under practical assumptions. The structure, insights and intuitions provided by the framework can serve as a basis for the further development of new schemes.
Quantum error mitigation is expected to play a crucial role in the practical applications of quantum machines for the foreseeable future. Thus it is important to put the numerous quantum error mitigation schemes proposed under a coherent framework that can highlight their underlying connections while providing guidance for their practical performance. In this article, we construct a general framework named linear quantum error mitigation that includes most of the state-of-the-art quantum error mitigation schemes. Within the framework, quantum error mitigation can be effectively viewed as extracting the error-mitigated state out of the noisy state, which introduces a new metric called extraction rate for indicating the cost-effectiveness of a given mitigation scheme. Using the framework, we have derived and compared the extraction rate, improvement in the fidelity and sampling overhead across various mitigation schemes under practical assumptions. The structure, insights and intuitions provided by the framework can serve as a basis for the further development of new schemes.
Recent experimental breakthroughs have signalled the imminent arrival of the early fault-tolerant era. However, for a considerable period in the foreseeable future, relying solely on quantum error correction for full error suppression will remain extremely challenging due to its substantial hardware overhead. Additional help from quantum error mitigation (QEM) is essential for bridging this gap towards achieving quantum advantage. The application of QEM has so far been restricted to expectation value estimation, leaving its extension to sampling-based algorithms -- which is expected to play a pivotal role in the early fault-tolerant era -- an unresolved challenge. In this work, we present a framework for applying any QEM techniques to obtain the error-mitigated output distribution, showing that this incurs no greater cost than estimating a single observable. We also devised a way to sample from this distribution and constructed an explicit scheme for applying any QEM methods to quantum phase estimation, which can be generalised to other sampling algorithms. Numerical experiments were conducted to validate the efficacy of these methods. We believe our methods significantly broaden the scope of QEM, extending its applicability to most algorithms of practical interest and forming a crucial step towards realising quantum advantage.
Abstract The inevitable accumulation of errors in near-future quantum devices represents a key obstacle in delivering practical quantum advantages, motivating the development of various quantum error-mitigation methods. Here, we derive fundamental bounds concerning how error-mitigation algorithms can reduce the computation error as a function of their sampling overhead. Our bounds place universal performance limits on a general error-mitigation protocol class. We use them to show (1) that the sampling overhead that ensures a certain computational accuracy for mitigating local depolarizing noise in layered circuits scales exponentially with the circuit depth for general error-mitigation protocols and (2) the optimality of probabilistic error cancellation among a wide class of strategies in mitigating the local dephasing noise on an arbitrary number of qubits. Our results provide a means to identify when a given quantum error-mitigation strategy is optimal and when there is potential room for improvement.
We apply quantum error mitigation techniques to a variety of benchmark problems and quantum computers to evaluate the performance of quantum error mitigation in practice. To do so, we define an empirically motivated, resource-normalized metric of the improvement of error mitigation which we call the improvement factor, and calculate this metric for each experiment we perform. The experiments we perform consist of zero-noise extrapolation and probabilistic error cancellation applied to two benchmark problems run on IBM, IonQ, and Rigetti quantum computers, as well as noisy quantum computer simulators. Our results show that error mitigation is on average more beneficial than no error mitigation — even when normalized by the additional resources used — but also emphasize that the performance of quantum error mitigation depends on the underlying computer.
Numerous quantum error-mitigation protocols have been proposed, motivated by the critical need to suppress noise effects on intermediate-scale quantum devices. Yet, their general potential and limitations remain elusive. In particular, to understand the ultimate feasibility of quantum error mitigation, it is crucial to characterize the fundamental sampling cost-how many times an arbitrary mitigation protocol must run a noisy quantum device. Here, we establish universal lower bounds on the sampling cost for quantum error mitigation to achieve the desired accuracy with high probability. Our bounds apply to general mitigation protocols, including the ones involving nonlinear postprocessing and those yet to be discovered. The results imply that the sampling cost required for a wide class of protocols to mitigate errors must grow exponentially with the circuit depth for various noise models, revealing the fundamental obstacles in the scalability of useful noisy near-term quantum devices.
Quantum error mitigation (QEM) infers noiseless expectation values from noisy variants of a target quantum circuit. Unlike quantum error correction, QEM requires no additional hardware resources and is therefore routinely employed in experiments on contemporary quantum processors. QEM strategies based on agnostic noise amplification (ANA) are intrinsically resilient to temporal noise drift during the execution of the experiment, but their sampling cost (runtime overhead) remains a major practical bottleneck. In this work, we introduce the virtual noise scaling framework and combine it with layered mitigation to further enhance performance. While virtual noise scaling consistently reduces sampling overhead, we identify a specific noise threshold for the layered mitigation approach. When the noise level is above this threshold, layered mitigation decreases the sampling overhead; conversely, when below it, the overhead increases. Notably, this threshold is circuit-independent and depends solely on the number of layers. For strong noise, the combination of virtual noise scaling and layered mitigation yields several orders of magnitude reduction in sampling overhead compared with conventional zero-noise extrapolation post-processing. As a result, mitigation tasks that once seemed unrealistic are now challenging but achievable. The proposed approach is compatible with dynamic circuits and can be seamlessly integrated with error detection and quantum error correction schemes. In addition, it is also applicable to ANA-based mitigation of mid-circuit measurements and preparation errors. Our findings extend to any constant-step amplification factors and therefore also apply to probabilistic error amplification (PEA) QEM. We validate our post-processing approach by applying it to previously reported experimental data, where we observe a substantial improvement in mitigation efficiency and accuracy.
Quantum noise poses a significant challenge for current near-term quantum computing. Quantum error mitigation (QEM) has therefore emerged as a key strategy, offering a practical and effective solution to reduce error impacts and enhance the performance of near-term variational quantum circuits (VQC). Given the lack of a comprehensive survey on this important topic in the literature, this article provides a dedicated overview of QEM, including both during and after the training of VQC. Specifically, during VQC training, we explore and discuss key QEM techniques such as optimal control and dynamical decoupling. For the post-processing stage of VQC, we will examine and discuss mitigation techniques such as zero-noise extrapolation (ZNE) and probabilistic error cancellation (PEC). For each of these QEM techniques, we will investigate the fundamentals, mitigation concepts, and recent advances. Subsequently, we also explore research toolboxes, including Mitiq and Qiskit Aer, as well as provide a case study that demonstrates contextual multi-armed bandit-guided ZNE. Finally, we discuss ongoing problems and future research initiatives, including ML-assisted mitigation and integration with error correction. This survey article aims to synthesize the state-of-the-art in QEM, offer organized insights across approaches, and propose potential paths towards error-resilient quantum computing.