Jul 2026· 2026 IEEE International Conference on Quantum Software (QSW)· pp. 79-88· 0 citations· 20 references
Abstract
Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices impose structural constraints on the training of Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs). In the absence of full error correction, each quantum gate introduces a non-zero probability of error that accumulates with circuit depth, while gradient estimation through finite sampling adds additional statistical variability. As a result, convergence depends on a delicate balance between physical coherence and estimation variance. In this setting, the depth of the variational ansatz not only determines model expressivity, but also its operational feasibility under noise. Without an explicit characterization of the interaction between error accumulation, number of measurements (shots), and control strategies, increasing experimental resources may fail to improve performance and can even become counterproductive. In this work, we empirically analyze how circuit depth affects the practical signal of the gradient under depolarizing noise. Across multiple configurations ($q=4-7$ qubits), we observe a pattern consistent with an effective exponential attenuation of the coherent gradient contribution, characterized by a per-layer rate $\epsilon_{\text{eff}}$. The estimated magnitude of $\epsilon_{\text{eff}}$ depends on circuit complexity and remains largely independent of the measurement budget, indicating that it primarily reflects architectural and physical factors rather than sampling effects. The analysis of adaptive control strategies further suggests that accuracy gains are constrained by gradient attenuation, rather than scaling significantly with circuit depth. However, a crossmode comparison across three distinct training strategies reveals that, while accuracy improvements remain modest, adaptive perturbations substantially improve the statistical detectability of the attenuation signal, acting as diagnostic probes rather than mere optimization heuristics. Taken together, these results suggest that the usable depth of a variational ansatz can be interpreted as an emergent property of the effective signal-to-noise regime, governed by a measurable structural parameter whose ranking across circuit configurations is preserved independently of the training mode. This framework enables principled comparison of circuit architectures in terms of their effective trainability under noise, providing guidance for architectural and control design in Quantum Machine Learning under NISQ conditions.
This work analyzes how circuit design constraints can systematically reduce the measurement overhead associated with repeated evaluations of the candidate gate pool in adaptive algorithms by focusing on the Hadamard test circuit architecture, hardware-aware qubit connectivity, and problem-specific adaptive framework.
Extracting quantum information from a quantum state is a fundamental task of quantum computation, often requiring the estimation of many non-commuting observables under a finite measurement budget. For both near-term and early fault-tolerant settings, the measurement protocol must balance statistical efficiency against implementation resources such as circuit depth, connectivity, and entangling-gate count. Many existing strategies focus on two extremes: hardware-friendly product measurements with high sampling cost, and fully commuting measurements with deep circuits. Here we recast resource-constrained measurement design as a generative learning problem. We introduce FlowMeas, which uses a generative flow network to directly sample finite ensembles of shallow Clifford measurement circuits subject to a prescribed shot budget and hardware constraints. At zero entangling depth, FlowMeas learns qubit-wise commuting measurement schedules and already matches or improves leading product-measurement methods on nearly all molecular benchmarks. Allowing one or two entangling gate layers yields further reductions in energy estimation error of up to $27\%$ relative to the strongest state-independent product-measurement baseline. The learned policy can also be reused across related Hamiltonians, substantially accelerating retraining along a molecular potential-energy surface. We further obtain results for molecular Hamiltonians with up to 20 qubits and apply the framework to a compactly encoded 54-qubit interacting fermionic model, extending the demonstrated scale beyond prior molecular benchmarks. These results establish generative learning as a flexible and unified framework for quantum measurement design under practical resource constraints.
Jun Dai, O. Nahman-Lévesque, Guillaume Rabusseau et al.· 0 citations
Learning unknown noise processes in quantum systems reveals their physical origin and informs error suppression, mitigation, and correction. Characterizing a general quantum process requires exponentially many parameters inferred from noncommuting measurements. Because these measurements cannot be performed simultaneously, the sample complexity grows exponentially. For Pauli channels, quantum memory and entangling operations can transform this task into measurements of commuting observables, reducing complexity exponentially. However, noise in these resources increases the overhead, leaving open whether any advantage remains in realistic devices. Here, we introduce error-mitigated entanglement-enhanced learning, analyze it theoretically, and demonstrate it experimentally. We quantify the noise-induced overhead, perform hypothesis testing with up to 64 qubits, and learn intrinsic noise in parallel-gate layers using up to 16 qubits of a superconducting processor. We show that noisy quantum memory provides a learning advantage, with a current experimental overhead of 1.33 ± 0.05 per qubit, below the no-entanglement lower bound of 2. The authors show that entanglement with noisy quantum memory can significantly speed up learning of quantum processes. With error mitigation, their method characterizes quantum noise at scale and outperforms entanglement-free approaches.
A. Seif, Senrui Chen, Swarnadeep Majumder et al.· Nature Communications· 12 citations
The barren-plateau problem—the exponential flattening of optimization landscapes—severely limits the trainability of quantum neural networks (QNNs) on near-term hardware. This review examines ansatz-design and complementary mitigation strategies for few-qubit QNNs under finite-shot noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) constraints. Its primary conceptual contribution is a literature-grounded reframing of gradient-based trainability around pointwise finite-shot gradient signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) while retaining exact-gradient landscape variance as a complementary theoretical diagnostic. This reframing follows because gradient-based optimization acts on finite-shot gradient estimates whose statistical resolvability directly determines whether the optimizer receives a reliably distinguishable update signal, whereas numerical studies restricted to 2–10 qubits generally cannot establish asymptotic exponential or polynomial gradient-decay laws without theoretical support. Estimator SNR therefore addresses the immediate experimental question of whether the update signal is distinguishable from its sampling uncertainty, whereas exact-gradient variance characterizes landscape concentration. The review surveys ansatz design, parameter initialization, cost-function selection, and error management, and develops a conditional design heuristic: problem-inspired ansätze are preferred when the task maps onto circuit families with demonstrated trainability properties; otherwise, shallow hardware-efficient ansätze provide controlled baselines. As a secondary contribution, the review proposes a complete eight-configuration
2
3
factorial framework for evaluating interactions among restricted entanglement, local cost functions, and active residual shortcuts under matched measurement budgets. An exact identity motivates testing the interaction between restricted entanglement and local costs at the exact-gradient-signal level, but the interaction is tested two-sided; all estimator-SNR interactions remain open empirical questions. The framework is presented as an implementable research agenda enabled by the SNR perspective rather than as evidence that any interaction has been established.
Brandon Shen, K. Ling· Journal of high school scien...· 0 citations
Variational quantum circuits (VQCs) are central to near-term quantum computing, yet their practical deployment is severely hindered by noise. While existing error mitigation methods, such as zero-noise extrapolation (ZNE), typically assume static noise, real noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) systems exhibit dynamic, time-varying noise that remains largely unaddressed. To overcome this critical gap, our work introduces a novel adaptive noise mitigation framework for VQCs that integrates ZNE with contextual multi-armed bandits (CMAB), enabling dynamic, context-aware selection of circuit-folding levels based on ansatz parameters (e.g., depth, parameter count) and the evolving noise environment. Unlike fixed-fold or heuristic ZNE, our approach uses online adaptation to improve the accuracy of ZNE and reduce redundant quantum circuit executions. Our extensive simulations and experiments on real quantum hardware reveal the following important properties: (i) deeper VQCs accumulate noise, degrading accuracy and increasing the number of quantum circuit executions; (ii) ZNE restores estimator fidelity when the folding level is chosen appropriately; and (iii) CMAB-guided folding cuts quantum circuit execution round trips by up to 40%, bytes exchanged by up to 35%, and end-to-end cost by up to 30% under a 10 Mbps budget, with up to 6.9% higher estimator fidelity (CIFAR-10, depth 3, noise band $\eta =0.05$ ), versus fixed-fold and grid-search ZNE. These results demonstrate substantial performance gains over existing noise mitigation methods, underscoring the effectiveness of our design in supporting robust noise mitigation for VQCs. The source code is also publicly released to support reproducibility.
Ratun Rahman, Dinh C. Nguyen· IEEE Journal on Selected Are...· 1 citation
Coupling between a quantum system and its environment causes decoherence by transferring information from the system to environmental degrees of freedom. When discretized in time, such interactions can be interpreted as sequences of weak measurements that provide an effective model of noisy quantum dynamics. Motivated by this picture, we propose an AI-assisted error-mitigation framework for quantum diffusion processes generated by sequential local weak measurements. The forward process progressively erases information from the input state through weak measurements performed in randomly selected Pauli bases, producing basis-dependent local dephasing and locally depolarizing dynamics on average. Machine-learning models are trained on exact synthetic density matrices to learn a channel- and distribution-specific denoising map and estimate the corresponding pre-noise state. We benchmark the approach on single-qubit states and separable and entangled multi-qubit registers. We also study distribution-dependent local-to-global reconstruction, in which local reduced density matrices are used to reconstruct the global state. This experimentally motivated setting relies on locally accessible information and is therefore compatible with noisy and distributed quantum systems. More broadly, the framework provides a hybrid classical-quantum approach for approximating non-unitary dynamics and mitigating coherence loss.
Yuval Idan, Ofek Nourian, E. Mentovich et al.· 0 citations