Fidelity estimation is a critical yet resource-intensive step in testing quantum programs on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, where the required number of measurements is difficult to predefine due to hardware noise, device heterogeneity, and transpilation-induced circuit transformations. We present QuFid, an adaptive and noise-aware framework that determines measurement budgets online by leveraging circuit structure and runtime statistical feedback. QuFid models a quantum program as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) and employs a control-flow-aware random walk to characterize noise propagation along gate dependencies. Backend-specific effects are captured via transpilation-induced structural deformation metrics, which are integrated into the random-walk formulation to induce a noise-propagation operator. Circuit complexity is then quantified through the spectral characteristics of this operator, providing a principled and lightweight basis for adaptive measurement planning. Experiments on 18 quantum benchmarks executed on IBM Quantum backends show that QuFid significantly reduces measurement cost compared to fixed-shot and learning-based baselines, while consistently maintaining acceptable fidelity bias.
Fidelity estimation is a critical yet resource-intensive step in testing quantum programs on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, where the required number of measurements is difficult to predefine due to hardware noise, device heterogeneity, and transpilation-induced circuit transformations. We present QuFid, an adaptive and noise-aware framework that determines measurement budgets online by leveraging circuit structure and runtime statistical feedback. QuFid models a quantum program as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) and employs a control-flow-aware random walk to characterize noise propagation along gate dependencies. Backend-specific effects are captured via transpilation-induced structural deformation metrics, which are integrated into the random-walk formulation to induce a noise-propagation operator. Circuit complexity is then quantified through the spectral characteristics of this operator, providing a principled and lightweight basis for adaptive measurement planning. Experiments on 18 quantum benchmarks executed on IBM Quantum backends show that QuFid significantly reduces measurement cost compared to fixed-shot and learning-based baselines, while consistently maintaining acceptable fidelity bias.
Fidelity estimation is a critical yet resource-intensive step in testing quantum programs on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, where the required number of measurements is difficult to predefine due to hardware noise, device heterogeneity, and transpilation-induced circuit transformations. We present QuFid, an adaptive and noise-aware framework that determines measurement budgets online by leveraging circuit structure and runtime statistical feedback. QuFid models a quantum program as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) and employs a control-flow-aware random walk to characterize noise propagation along gate dependencies. Backend-specific effects are captured via transpilation-induced structural deformation metrics, which are integrated into the random-walk formulation to induce a noise-propagation operator. Circuit complexity is then quantified through the spectral characteristics of this operator, providing a principled and lightweight basis for adaptive measurement planning. Experiments on 18 quantum benchmarks executed on IBM Quantum backends show that QuFid significantly reduces measurement cost compared to fixed-shot and learning-based baselines, while consistently maintaining acceptable fidelity bias.
Quantum computers in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era face significant challenges due to inherent noise and limited qubit coherence. Accurate fidelity evaluation of quantum states necessitates multiple repeated measurements to obtain statistical results. But determining the optimal number of measurements remains an open problem due to the dynamic, device-dependent nature of quantum noise. Existing methods either assume prior knowledge of the noise model or inherently employ a fixed measurement strategy, which limits their applicability in practical deployment scenarios. This paper presents AutoFid, an adaptive and noise-aware fidelity measurement framework that automatically determines the number of required tests based on circuit structure and hardware feedback. AutoFid models quantum circuits as Directed Acyclic Graphs and estimates structural complexity via random walks, enabling estimation of measurement effort. It further incorporates transpilation-aware features such as gate fidelity, depth inflation, and crosstalk to refine iteration budgets. During runtime, AutoFid dynamically samples fidelity results and employs an early stopping strategy based on confidence intervals to reduce redundant measurements while preserving accuracy guarantees. We evaluate AutoFid on 18 quantum benchmarks executed on real IBMQ hardware platforms. Experimental results show that AutoFid reduces measurement costs by more than 50% compared to both fixed-shot and learning-based baselines, while consistently maintaining fidelity bias below 0.01. Additional analysis using classical software testing metrics and ablation studies demonstrate its effectiveness, robustness, and adaptability across a wide range of quantum workloads.
Testing quantum programs on NISQ (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) backends is challenging because the noise disturbs outcome distributions and can affect pass/fail decisions. We present Q-BRIDGE, a graph learning-based approach that converts noisy observations into denoised distributions suitable for oracle-based verification. Q-BRIDGE uses a graph transformer architecture to encode a transpiled quantum circuit, capturing the characteristics of its gates and their connectivity; the physical backend information is encoded together with the logical structure of the circuit. An additional conditioning layer, based on FiLM (Feature-Wise Linear Modulation), takes the encoding as input and integrates noisy observations to produce denoised outcomes. We evaluate Q-BRIDGE on 23 IBM noise backends and 6 circuit families representative of practical workloads. In the first setting, we train a separate Q-BRIDGE model for each backend; in the second setting, we train a single general model shared across all backends. Across both settings, Q-BRIDGE outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline in noise mitigation by a large margin. In testing scenarios with noisy executions, Q-BRIDGE achieves 93.97%-94.90% precision and 82.50%-83.51% recall in detecting bug-induced test failures, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art baseline. These results indicate that considering the graph structure of the transpiled circuits and the physical characteristics of specific quantum backends is a practical route to more reliable noise-aware quantum program testing.
Quantum kernels hold significant promise for achieving computational advantages in quantum machine learning (QML), yet their effectiveness critically depends on the design of expressive and hardware-compatible feature maps, a challenge that is particularly pronounced in Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices with limited qubits, gate errors, and restricted connectivity. In this work, we propose a hardware-aware methodology for automated quantum kernel design that integrates quantum device characteristics with learning-based evaluation. Specifically, candidate quantum circuits explored within the hardware-aware circuit space are represented as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) encoding hardware-specific information such as gate operations, qubit interactions, and noise properties, while a dual graph neural network (GNN) predictor is employed to estimate key surrogate metrics, including probability of successful trials (PST) and kernel-target alignment (KTA), enabling efficient and accurate assessment of circuit fidelity and kernel performance to facilitate the identification of task-specific quantum kernels. Furthermore, feature selection is incorporated to reduce input dimensionality and ensure compatibility with near-term devices. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, including Credit Card (CC), MNIST-5, and FMNIST-4, demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing baselines in classification accuracy, effectively balancing hardware constraints and model expressivity under realistic noise conditions. These results highlight the potential of combining hardware-aware design with deep learning techniques to advance practical quantum kernel methods under hardware-calibrated noisy simulation settings.
Executing quantum circuits on current quantum Best Cut Identification devices is fundamentally limited by noise, decoherence, and hardware constraints. Circuit Knitting (CK) techniques enable the execution of larger circuits by decomposing them into smaller sub-circuits, at the cost of reconstruction overhead. At the same time, Quantum Error Mitigation (QEM) methods improve fidelity but introduce additional complexity. In this work, we propose a fidelity-aware framework that jointly optimizes circuit partitioning and error mitigation to maximize end-to-end execution fidelity. We introduce a unified model that captures the trade-off between sub-circuit operational fidelity, reconstruction penalties induced by cuts, and the impact of error mitigation. Based on this model, we formulate the cut placement problem as an optimization task and solve it to identify fidelity-optimal partitioning strategies accounting for error mitigation and under realistic hardware constraints. Notably, our framework integrates calibration-driven noise models and supports practical fidelity estimation using backend-specific parameters. We validate the proposed method on both noisy simulators (IBM Fake Backends) and real quantum hardware (IQM Lagrange), proving consistent improvements in execution fidelity with gains of up to 40% over standard circuit execution.
Abstract Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computing is fundamentally constrained by hardware noise that is not only large but also temporally drifting and structurally complex. Traditional quantum error mitigation (QEM) techniques, such as Zero-Noise Extrapolation (ZNE), often rely on simplified noise assumptions that degrade under coherent errors and deep circuit structures. Conversely, existing machine learning-based QEM approaches typically treat device noise as a static background, leading to poor generalization when hardware calibration shifts. In this work, we propose \textbf{Calib-GNN}, a novel framework that explicitly integrates real-time hardware calibration data into a Graph Neural Network (GNN) architecture. By embedding gate-specific error rates directly into the graph representation, our model learns a dynamic mapping from noisy measurements to ideal expectation values. Through extensive simulations based on real noise profiles from the IBM Quantum \texttt{ibm\_fez} backend, we demonstrate that Calib-GNN significantly outperforms standard baselines. Specifically, it reduces the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) by approximately 14\% compared to ZNE on random circuits and exhibits superior robustness against severe noise drift where traditional models fail. Furthermore, we show that Calib-GNN effectively scales to deeper circuits and recovers the ground state energy of the H2 molecule in Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) tasks with high fidelity, overcoming the limitations of ZNE in the presence of coherent noise.