quant-phSep 15, 2026

QEMScore: How Much Does the Measurement Add to Learned Quantum Error Mitigation?

Authors: Yue Zhao, Huayue Gu, Yushun Dong, Xiyang Hu

Abstract

How much does the noisy measurement add to learned quantum error mitigation? An accuracy table cannot say, because a model handed circuit structure can score well without reading the measurement at all. QEMScore adds the comparison that can. Each simulated circuit carries an exact ideal answer. The learned mitigator is scored beside a capacity-matched control, a model just as flexible that reads the same circuit description but never the measurement. Each method's measurement spend is accounted and not equalized. We run a controlled campaign on simulated circuits and reanalyze two published learned mitigators, Q-LEAR and QRAFT, from their released hardware data. Three findings stand out. First, under familiar within-family conditions (S0) evaluated across two spin-chain families and three seeds, continuous couplings identify the target, and the control that never reads the measurement matches 87.7 to 100.5 percent of the mitigator's gain over an affine fit to the circuit description. A plain polynomial in the coupling parameters, fitted after the campaign, beats the mitigator on all six evaluations, reflecting the selected learners' capacity. Second, for these selected learners, matching most of the gain is not matching the accuracy: on five of six evaluations the mitigator removes 19.5 to 74.5 percent of the error the capacity-matched control leaves, a learner-specific gap rather than a measurement requirement. Third, on released hardware data where descriptors only partially identify queries, the findings differ: flexible models of the descriptors show negligible mean gain over affine fits in Q-LEAR, and measurement inputs carry predictive gains in both Q-LEAR and QRAFT. These comparisons reflect representation- and protocol-specific behavior rather than an isolated cross-regime difference. A learned mitigator's accuracy should therefore be reported beside such controls.

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Weakly Supervised Quantum Error Mitigation

Supervised approaches to quantum error mitigation learn a map from noisy circuit outputs to ideal ones, and therefore require the ideal outputs. Producing those ideal outputs demands noiseless classical simulation, whose cost grows exponentially with system size, so supervision is unavailable in exactly the regime where mitigation matters most. We ask whether cheap, individually unreliable signals drawn from circuit structure and hardware calibration can take the place of ideal labels. We assemble sixteen heuristic labeling functions (stabilizer and parity constraints, relaxation and readout characteristics, local depth, gate counts, and neighboring activity), reconcile their disagreements with a probabilistic label model, and read the resulting per-qubit error probabilities as a readout channel whose inverse mitigates the measured distribution. No ideal output enters the training path. On 147,000147{,}000 five-qubit circuits executed on two IBM devices, the method removes 24.3%24.3\% (Algiers) and 28.8%28.8\% (Hanoi) of the Kullback-Leibler divergence to the ideal distribution, against 15.4%15.4\% and 21.5%21.5\% for the strongest published analytical baseline, a margin that holds on both devices and lies far outside its bootstrap interval. Supervised neural models trained on ideal distributions remain stronger where such labels exist, and we quantify that gap rather than setting it aside; the method's claim is to the regime where they do not, since the labels they require cannot be computed for the circuits mitigation is needed for. The codes will be released shortly.
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