Probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) is a technique that generates error-mitigated estimates of expectation values from ensembles of quantum circuits. In this work we extend the application of PEC from unitary-only circuits to dynamic circuits with midcircuit measurements and classically controlled (feedforward) Clifford operations. Our approach extends the sparse Pauli-Lindblad noise model from characterizing gates to characterizing target channels containing midcircuit measurements and feedforward while accounting for nonlocal measurement crosstalk in superconducting processors. Our mitigation and monitoring experiments provide a holistic view for the performance of the protocols developed in this work. These capabilities will be a crucial tool in the exploration of near-term dynamic circuit applications.
Probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) is a technique that generates error-mitigated estimates of expectation values from ensembles of quantum circuits. In this work we extend the application of PEC from unitary-only circuits to dynamic circuits with midcircuit measurements and classically controlled (feedforward) Clifford operations. Our approach extends the sparse Pauli-Lindblad noise model from characterizing gates to characterizing target channels containing midcircuit measurements and feedforward while accounting for nonlocal measurement crosstalk in superconducting processors. Our mitigation and monitoring experiments provide a holistic view for the performance of the protocols developed in this work. These capabilities will be a crucial tool in the exploration of near-term dynamic circuit applications.
Current quantum computers suffer from a level of noise that prohibits extracting useful results directly from longer computations. The figure of merit in many near-term quantum algorithms is an expectation value measured at the end of the computation, which experiences a bias in the presence of hardware noise. A systematic way to remove such bias is probabilistic error cancellation (PEC). PEC requires a full characterization of the noise and introduces a sampling overhead that increases exponentially with circuit depth, prohibiting high-depth circuits at realistic noise levels. Probabilistic error reduction (PER) is a related quantum error mitigation method that systematically reduces the sampling overhead at the cost of reintroducing bias. In combination with zero-noise extrapolation, PER can yield expectation values with an accuracy comparable to PEC. Noise reduction through PER is broadly applicable to near-term algorithms, and the automated implementation of PER is thus desirable for facilitating its widespread use. To this end, we present an automated quantum error mitigation software framework that includes noise tomography and application of PER to user-specified circuits. We provide a multi-platform Python package that implements a recently developed Pauli noise tomography (PNT) technique for learning a sparse Pauli noise model and exploits a Pauli noise scaling method to carry out PER. We also provide software tools that leverage a previously developed toolchain, employing PyGSTi for gate set tomography and providing a functionality to use the software Mitiq for PER and zero-noise extrapolation to obtain error-mitigated expectation values on a user-defined circuit.
Quantum error mitigation is regarded as a possible path to near-term quantum utility. The methods under the quantum error mitigation umbrella term, such as probabilistic error cancellation (PEC), zero-noise extrapolation (ZNE) or Clifford data regression (CDR) are able to significantly reduce the error for the estimation of expectation values, although at an exponentially scaling cost, i.e., in the sampling overhead. In this work, we present a method to reduce the sampling overhead of PEC through Pauli error propagation combined with classical preprocessing. Our findings indicate that this method significantly reduces sampling overheads for Clifford circuits, leveraging the well-defined interaction between the Clifford group and Pauli noise. Additionally, we show that the method is applicable to non-Clifford circuits, though with more limited effectiveness, primarily constrained by the number of non-Clifford gates present in the circuit. We further provide examples of Clifford sub-circuits commonly encountered in relevant calculations, such as resource state generation in measurement-based quantum computing.
Probabilistic Error Cancellation (PEC) is a standard technique for mitigating noise in quantum computations, but its unbiasedness relies on accurate knowledge of the underlying noise parameters. In practice, these parameters are inferred from experimental data and may be inaccurate. We introduce a protocol that tests PEC parameter consistency on hardware by applying Direct Fidelity Estimation (DFE) to the effective mitigated state. The resulting DFE overlap serves not only as a witness of parameter miscalibration but, under appropriate conditions, also reveals whether the PEC parameters have been overestimated or underestimated. We establish this behavior for arbitrary circuits under global depolarizing noise and for Clifford circuits under general Pauli-stochastic noise. For arbitrary circuits subject to Pauli-stochastic noise, the underestimation result holds generally, while the corresponding overestimation result is established perturbatively for sufficiently small consistent miscalibrations under an additional nondegeneracy condition. We further show that the purity of the effective mitigated operator provides a more general diagnostic, allowing the miscalibration direction to be identified for arbitrary circuits and arbitrary parameter deviations. Finally, we describe a two-copy PEC procedure for measuring this quantity and show that, together with the DFE overlap, it determines the Hilbert-Schmidt distance from the ideal state. The sampling overhead incurred by our protocol is the same as that of PEC, and we discuss strategies to improve it.
Quantum error mitigation techniques mimic noiseless quantum circuits by running several related noisy circuits and combining their outputs in particular ways. How well such techniques work is thought to depend strongly on how noisy the underlying gates are. Weakly-entangling gates, like R Z Z ( θ ) for small angles θ , can be much less noisy than entangling Clifford gates, like CNOT and CZ, and they arise naturally in circuits used to simulate quantum dynamics. However, such weakly-entangling gates are non-Clifford, and are therefore incompatible with two of the most prominent error mitigation techniques to date: probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) and the related form of zero-noise extrapolation (ZNE). This paper generalizes these techniques to non-Clifford gates, and comprises two complementary parts. The first part shows how to effectively transform any given quantum channel into (almost) any desired channel, at the cost of a sampling overhead, by adding random Pauli gates and processing the measurement outcomes. This enables us to cancel or properly amplify noise in non-Clifford gates, provided we can first characterize such gates in detail. The second part therefore introduces techniques to do so for noisy R Z Z ( θ ) gates. These techniques are robust to state preparation and measurement (SPAM) errors, and exhibit concentration and sensitivity—crucial statistical properties for many experiments. They are related to randomized benchmarking, and may also be of interest beyond the context of error mitigation. We find that while non-Clifford gates can be less noisy than related Cliffords, their noise is fundamentally more complex, which can lead to surprising and sometimes unwanted effects in error mitigation. Whether this trade-off can be broadly advantageous remains to be seen.
We show that combining quantum error detection (QED) with probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) gives more accurate and lower-variance estimates than PEC alone, provided that the symmetry measurements required for QED are carefully chosen. Because noisy symmetry measurements can negate the benefits of the PEC+QED approach, we cast the selection of measurement configurations as a classical optimization problem that systematically suppresses the impact of noise. Applying optimized PEC+QED to GHZ-state output distributions and to simulating the time-dynamics of a generalized superfast encoded Fermi-Hubbard model, we find consistent improvements over PEC. For GHZ states, the optimization over symmetry measurement configurations is essential for achieving an advantage. For the Fermi-Hubbard model, PEC+QED improves observable estimation on a 2×2 lattice and for larger systems the mitigation overheads can be reduced by measuring only subsets of stabilizers. Our results demonstrate the importance of circuit-specific tailoring of QEM techniques and that fault-tolerant design principles may already provide value for near-term devices.
Until fault-tolerance becomes implementable at scale, quantum computing will heavily rely on noise mitigation techniques. While methods such as zero noise extrapolation with probabilistic error amplification (ZNE-PEA) and probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) have been successfully tested on hardware recently, their scalability to larger circuits may be limited. Here, we introduce the tensor-network error mitigation (TEM) algorithm, which acts in post-processing to correct the noise-induced errors in estimations of physical observables. The method consists of the construction of a tensor network representing the inverse of the global noise channel affecting the state of the quantum processor, and the consequent application of the map to informationally complete measurement outcomes obtained from the noisy state. TEM does therefore not require additional quantum operations other than the implementation of informationally complete POVMs, which can be achieved through randomised local measurements. The key advantage of TEM is that the measurement overhead is quadratically smaller than in PEC. We test TEM extensively in numerical simulations in different regimes. We find that TEM can be applied to circuits of twice the depth compared to what is achievable with PEC under realistic conditions with sparse Pauli-Lindblad noise, such as those in [E. van den Berg et al., Nat. Phys. (2023)]. By using Clifford circuits, we explore the capabilities of the method in wider and deeper circuits with lower noise levels. We find that in the case of 100 qubits and depth 100, both PEC and ZNE fail to produce accurate results by using ∼105 shots, while TEM succeeds.