Abstract Noise remains one of the most significant challenges in the development of reliable and scalable quantum processors. While quantum error correction and mitigation techniques offer potential solutions, they are often limited by the substantial overhead required. To address this, tailored approaches that exploit specific hardware characteristics have emerged. In quantum computing architectures utilizing cat‐qubits, the inherent exponential suppression of bit‐flip errors can significantly reduce the qubit count needed for effective error correction. In this work, how the unique noise bias of cat‐qubits can be harnessed to enhance error mitigation efficiency is explored. Specifically, it is demonstrated that the sampling cost associated with probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) methods can be exponentially reduced with the depth of the circuit when gates act on cat‐qubits and preserve the noise bias. Similar results also hold for Clifford circuits and Pauli channels. The error mitigation scheme is benchmarked across various quantum machine learning circuits, showcasing its practical advantages for near‐term applications on cat‐qubit architectures.
Abstract Noise remains one of the most significant challenges in the development of reliable and scalable quantum processors. While quantum error correction and mitigation techniques offer potential solutions, they are often limited by the substantial overhead required. To address this, tailored approaches that exploit specific hardware characteristics have emerged. In quantum computing architectures utilizing cat‐qubits, the inherent exponential suppression of bit‐flip errors can significantly reduce the qubit count needed for effective error correction. In this work, how the unique noise bias of cat‐qubits can be harnessed to enhance error mitigation efficiency is explored. Specifically, it is demonstrated that the sampling cost associated with probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) methods can be exponentially reduced with the depth of the circuit when gates act on cat‐qubits and preserve the noise bias. Similar results also hold for Clifford circuits and Pauli channels. The error mitigation scheme is benchmarked across various quantum machine learning circuits, showcasing its practical advantages for near‐term applications on cat‐qubit architectures.
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.
Assessing whether a noisy quantum device can potentially exhibit quantum advantage is essential for selecting practical quantum utility tasks that are not efficiently verifiable by classical means. For optimization, a prominent candidate for quantum advantage, entropy benchmarking provides insights based concomitantly on the specifics of the application and its implementation, as well as hardware noise. However, such an approach still does not account for finite-shot effects or for quantum error mitigation (QEM), a key near-term error suppression strategy that reduces estimation bias at the cost of increased sampling overhead. We address this limitation by developing a benchmarking framework that explicitly incorporates finite-shot statistics and the resource overhead induced by QEM. Our framework quantifies quantum advantage through the confidence that an estimated energy lies within an interval defined by the best-known classical upper and lower bounds. Using a proof-of-principle numerical study of the two-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model at size 8×8, we demonstrate that the framework effectively identifies noise and shot-budget regimes in which the probabilistic error cancellation (PEC), a representative QEM method, is operationally advantageous, and potential quantum advantage is not hindered by finite-shot effects. Overall, our approach equips end-users with a framework based on lightweight numerics for assessing potential practical quantum advantage in optimization on near-future quantum hardware, in light of the allocated shot budget.
Near-term quantum workloads demand error management, yet the two lightest-weight techniques, Quantum Error Detection (QED) and Probabilistic Error Cancellation (PEC), have complementary cost profiles whose joint architectural design space remains unexplored. QED encodes logical qubits and discards error-flagged runs, filtering noise with low qubit overhead but leaving residual errors; PEC can correct these in software, but at exponential cost in noise strength. If QED efficiently reduces per-gate noise, PEC's cost savings can outweigh QED's discard overhead; realizing this, however, requires solving two system-level design challenges.
First, the \textit{QED interval} -- how often detection cycles are inserted -- is a tunable architectural parameter governing the cost-accuracy tradeoff. We derive an efficiency condition and show that the canonical one-cycle-per-gate frequency does not achieve break-even in any code we evaluate, while optimized intervals on high-rate Iceberg codes do. Second, we discover that naive PEC+QED integration \textit{degrades} accuracy below the QED-only baseline. The root cause is a transient error profile in the first detection cycle that corrupts PEC's noise model. We develop \textit{steady-state extraction}, a co-designed characterization protocol that isolates steady-state error behavior, reducing estimation bias by up to 10.2×. On a [[6,4,2]] Iceberg code running QAOA (p=4--8) with a fixed shot budget, PEC+QED achieves 2--11× lower absolute error and up to 31× lower MSE versus PEC on physical qubits, with per-interval savings compounding over interval depth.
Qubits with strongly biased noise, in which phase-flip errors are orders of magnitude more frequent than bit-flips, arise both naturally, as in electron and nuclear spins, and by engineering, as in stabilized cat qubits. This noise structure holds the promise of reducing the daunting hardware overhead of fault-tolerant quantum computing, but exploiting it requires physical operations that do not convert frequent phase-flips into rare bit-flips. In this review, we analyze the most prominent fault-tolerant protocols for biased-noise qubits, organized according to the available set of such bias-preserving operations. When this set is restricted to the CZ gate together with preparation and measurement in the X basis, we show that the complexity of the required syndrome extraction gadgets essentially cancels the benefit of the noise bias: at experimentally relevant error rates, one may as well ignore the bias and rely on standard error correction designed for depolarizing noise. The situation changes drastically when a bias-preserving CX gate is available: the hierarchy of errors can then be reflected in the structure of the code, with frequent phase-flips corrected by a dedicated high-threshold code and rare bit-flips by concatenation with a high-rate code. The same hierarchy also enables hardware-efficient preparation of magic states. Finally, as a bias-preserving CX is forbidden in naturally biased platforms and challenging in engineered ones, we present a measurement-based architecture in which a high-fidelity quantum non-demolition readout of multi-qubit Pauli Z operators takes its place, extending these overhead reductions to a much broader range of physical platforms.
Probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) is a promising error mitigation technique that reduces the error rate without auxiliary quantum bits. However, PEC has two problems that need to be resolved: 1) there is no good PEC technique for parameterized gates and 2) sampling overhead (SO) grows exponentially with the number of PEC mitigated gates. We first propose a parameterized gate PEC (PGPEC) that mitigates the error without fully characterizing the gates, as the original PEC requires. The result shows that the number of gates requiring characterization for a thousand random circuits can be reduced by 97% or more. We next propose two novel approaches to solving the second problem. We propose a macro gate PEC (MGPEC) technique that aggregates multiple gates as a single macro gate to reduce the exponent of the SO. MGPEC reduces the SO by 49% on the QFT7 under the IBMQ noise model, which simulates real operation conditions of quantum circuits. We propose a design diversity PEC (DDPEC) technique to reduce the exponential basis of the SO. The results show that our DDPEC with design diversity check reduces overall SO by 13% on the QFT7 circuit under the IBM Q noise model. Combining the DDPEC with the MGPEC, we can reduce overall SO by 73%.