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arXiv:2610.27529

Collision-aware Bayesian mitigation of photon loss in linear optical quantum circuits

Seungwoo Kim, Seunghyun Ahn, Donguk Nam, Hyunho Cha, Jungwoo Lee

quant-phSubmitted Oct 20, 2026• Announced Oct 21, 2026• 0 citations
v1 · Oct 20, 2026v2 · Oct 25, 2026
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Abstract

Photon loss is the dominant noise source in linear optical quantum circuits. Each lost photon turns an ideal n-photon outcome into a pattern with fewer photons, so the detector counts no longer follow the ideal output distribution, and the lossless events that do follow it become exponentially rare as the photon number grows. Discarding the lossy events (postselection) therefore wastes most of the data at realistic loss rates, and the ideal distribution has to be inferred from the lossy counts themselves. Recycling-based mitigation (Mills & Mezher, Quantum 2026; Quandela's photon_recycling) reweights lossy samples to recover lossless probabilities, but its estimators are biased and restricted to the no-collision sector, where each output mode holds at most one photon. We instead treat the raw counts as Multinomial observations under per-photon binomial loss and infer the ideal output distribution and the loss rate jointly from a Bayesian posterior, which extends naturally to outputs with collisions. On data from the independent Perceval simulator at the scale of prior work (n=4 photons in m=20 and m=10 modes), the posterior has lower KL divergence than both recycling and postselection at every tested loss rate in the no-collision benchmark. In the collision regime it recovers the loss rate and the collision-pattern probabilities, which recycling cannot estimate, and stays below recycling at every loss rate and below postselection except at low loss, where the two are comparable. Its advantage over recycling grows with the sample count, and it supplies credible intervals that the baselines lack.

Comments
24 pages, 7 figures, 7 tables

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Photon loss is the dominant noise source in linear optical quantum circuits. Each lost photon turns an ideal n-photon outcome into a pattern with fewer photons, so the detector counts no longer follow the ideal output distribution, and the lossless events that do follow it become exponentially rare as the photon number grows. Discarding the lossy events (postselection) therefore wastes most of the data at realistic loss rates, and the ideal distribution has to be inferred from the lossy counts themselves. Recycling-based mitigation (Mills & Mezher, Quantum 2026; Quandela's photon_recycling) reweights lossy samples to recover lossless probabilities, but its estimators are biased and restricted to the no-collision sector, where each output mode holds at most one photon. We instead treat the raw counts as Multinomial observations under per-photon binomial loss and infer the ideal output distribution and the loss rate jointly from a Bayesian posterior, which extends naturally to outputs with collisions. On data from the independent Perceval simulator at the scale of prior work (n=4 photons in m=20 and m=10 modes), the posterior has lower KL divergence than both recycling and postselection at every tested loss rate in the no-collision benchmark. In the collision regime it recovers the loss rate and the collision-pattern probabilities, which recycling cannot estimate, and stays below recycling at every loss rate and below postselection except at low loss, where the two are comparable. Its advantage over recycling grows with the sample count, and it supplies credible intervals that the baselines lack.
Photon loss rates set an effective upper limit on the size of computations that can be run on current linear optical quantum devices. We present a family of techniques designed to mitigate the effects of photon loss on both output probabilities and expectation values derived from noisy linear optical circuits composed of an input of n photons, an m --mode interferometer, and m single photon detectors. Central to these techniques is the construction recycled probabilities . Recycled probabilities are constructed from output statistics affected by loss, and are designed to amplify the signal of the ideal (lossless) probabilities. Classical postprocessing techniques then take recycled probabilities as input and output a set of loss-mitigated probabilities, or expectation values. Our postprocessing methods result in biased estimators of the lossless probabilities. Nevertheless, we provide both analytical and numerical evidence that these methods can be applied, up to large sample sizes, to produce output probabilities with lower combined bias and statistical errors than the statistical errors of the output probabilities obtained from postselection. Therefore, these methods can outperform postselection - currently the standard method of coping with photon loss when sampling from discrete variable linear optical quantum circuits. In contrast, we provide evidence that the popular zero-noise extrapolation technique cannot improve on the performance of postselection for any photon loss rate.
BosonSampling is an intermediate model of quantum computation where linear-optical networks are used to solve sampling problems expected to be hard for classical computers. Since these devices are not expected to be universal for quantum computation, it remains an open question of whether any error-correction techniques can be applied to them, and thus it is important to investigate how robust the model is under natural experimental imperfections, such as losses and imperfect control of parameters. Here, we investigate the complexity of BosonSampling under photon losses, more specifically, the case where an unknown subset of the photons is randomly lost at the sources. We show that if kkk out of nnn photons are lost, then we cannot sample classically from a distribution that is $1/{n}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Theta}}(k)}$ close (in total variation distance) to the ideal distribution, unless a BPPNP{\text{BPP}}^{\text{NP}}BPPNP machine can estimate the permanents of Gaussian matrices in nO(k){n}^{O(k)}nO(k) time. In particular, if kkk is constant, this implies that simulating lossy BosonSampling is hard for a classical computer, under exactly the same complexity assumption used for the original lossless case.
Understanding how photon loss changes the classical complexity of BosonSampling is central to assessing the robustness of near-term photonic quantum advantage. In this work, we present a polynomial-time classical simulation algorithm for lossy BosonSampling that applies whenever a constant fraction of the input photons survives. We consider the standard fixed-loss model, where NNN input photons propagate through an MMM-mode interferometer and exactly N−nN-nN−n photons are lost uniformly at random, leaving nnn surviving photons at the output. For any constant surviving fraction n/N∈(0,1)n/N\in(0,1)n/N∈(0,1), the algorithm samples from a distribution within total variation distance ε\varepsilonε of the fixed-loss BosonSampling distribution with probability at least 1−δ1-δ1−δ over Haar-random interferometers, in time poly⁡(M,N,ε−1,δ−1)\operatorname{poly}(M,N,\varepsilon^{-1},δ^{-1})poly(M,N,ε−1,δ−1). We further extend the fixed-loss analysis to the uniform-transmission-loss model and obtain analogous polynomial-time simulability for any fixed transmission rate η∈(0,1)η\in(0,1)η∈(0,1). These results substantially extend the known provably simulable regime of n=O(εN)n=O(\sqrt{\varepsilon N})n=O(εN​) surviving photons or η=O(ε/N)η=O(\sqrt{\varepsilon/N})η=O(ε/N​) transmission rate, and demonstrate that even the experimentally relevant linear-survival regime can admit efficient classical simulation under the conditions considered here.
We analyze the impact of photon loss on the photon-number statistics of Gaussian states. Specifically, we propose and carefully evaluate several methods to mitigate deviations in the photon-number distributions of lossy (displaced) squeezed vacuum states from those of their lossless counterparts. These methods rely on appropriately redefining the parameters of Gaussian states when the loss budget is known in order to recover, as closely as possible, the desired photon-number distribution associated with each target state. While it is intrinsically hard to directly optimize the photon-number distribution of high-dimensional, correlated multimode Gaussian states, the proposed methods are instead based on optimizing specific key properties such as fidelity, phase-space functions, low-order moments of the underlying photon-number statistics, or overlap with the vacuum state. In particular, our results show that optimizing the fidelity between a pure Gaussian target state and a modified Gaussian state that has passed through a loss channel does typically not result in closeness of the corresponding photon-number distributions. Furthermore, we show that correcting for the vacuum overlap minimizes the deviation in the photon-number distribution for large parameter ranges which we explicitly prove for single-mode squeezed vacuum and provide numerical evidence for general (displaced) squeezed vacuum states. As photon loss is a key limitation for Gaussian boson sampling, our results provide insights into the feasibility and limitations of such photonic quantum simulations in lossy environments and offer guidelines for mitigating these imperfections.
For near-term quantum devices, an important challenge is to develop efficient methods to certify that noise levels are low enough to allow potentially useful applications to be carried out. We present such a method tailored to photonic quantum devices consisting of single photon sources coupled to linear optical circuits coupled to photon detectors. It uses the output statistics of BosonSampling experiments with input size nnn (nnn input photons in the ideal case). We propose a series of benchmark tests targetting two main sources of noise, namely photon loss and distinguishability. Our method results in a single-number metric, the Photonic Quality Factor, defined as the largest number of input photons for which the output statistics pass all tests. We provide strong evidence that passing all tests implies that our experiments are not efficiently classically simulable, by showing how several existing classical algorithms for efficiently simulating noisy BosonSampling fail the tests. Finally we show that BosonSampling experiments with average photon loss rate per mode scaling as o(1)o(1)o(1) and average fidelity of $ (1-o(\frac{1}{n^6}))^2$ between any two single photon states is sufficient to keep passing our tests. Unsurprisingly, our results highlight that scaling in a manner that avoids efficient classical simulability will at some point necessarily require error correction and mitigation.
Variational quantum algorithms are a leading approach to near-term quantum computing, but their scalability can be limited by barren plateaus and the sampling cost of resolving small changes in the loss landscape. Here, we study the trainability of passive linear-optical quantum circuits and introduce a framework based on the ratio of sample variance to circuit variance. This ratio determines the number of circuit samples required to resolve local loss differences and gradients to proportional accuracy. We apply this framework to photon-number observables and identify both trainable and non-trainable regimes. Supported by analytic results and a numerically observed polynomial decay of the circuit variance, we find that fixed-order photon-number polynomials require only polynomially many samples as the system size grows, whereas high-order polynomials and observables based on output probabilities generally require exponentially many samples. Within the trainable regime, we further identify classes of observables in which quantum estimation achieves a polynomial speed-up over multiple classical methods. Within this family, neural network observables provide one practical construction that allow measurement outcomes to be efficiently processed into the desired polynomial. These results establish photonic variational quantum computing as a promising platform for near-term applications.