A Fine-Grained and Efficient Reliability Analysis Framework for Noisy Quantum Circuits

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable, interpretable framework for assessing the reliability of noisy quantum circuits using a novel Noise Proxy Circuit and Proxy Fidelity, enabling accurate, execution-free fidelity estimation across diverse quantum devices.

Contribution

It proposes a new fine-grained, state-independent reliability analysis method with the Noise Proxy Circuit and Proxy Fidelity, improving accuracy and scalability over existing metrics.

Findings

Accurately estimates circuit fidelity with an average absolute difference of 0.031 to 0.069.

Provides a scalable and interpretable reliability evaluation framework.

Works effectively across various noise models and quantum devices.

Abstract

Evaluating the reliability of noisy quantum circuits is essential for implementing quantum algorithms on noisy quantum devices. However, current quantum hardware exhibits diverse noise mechanisms whose compounded effects make accurate and efficient reliability evaluation challenging. While state fidelity is the most faithful indicator of circuit reliability, it is experimentally and computationally prohibitive to obtain. Alternative metrics, although easier to compute, often fail to accurately reflect circuit reliability, lack universality across circuit types, or offer limited interpretability. To address these challenges, we propose a fine-grained, scalable, and interpretable framework for efficient and accurate reliability evaluation of noisy quantum circuits. Our approach performs a state-independent analysis to model how circuit reliability progressively degrades during execution. We introduce the Noise Proxy Circuit (NPC), which removes all logical operations while preserving the complete sequence of noise channels, thereby providing an abstraction of cumulative noise effects. Based on the NPC, we define Proxy Fidelity, a reliability metric that quantifies both qubit-level and circuit-level reliability. We further develop an analytical algorithm to estimate Proxy Fidelity under depolarizing, thermal relaxation, and readout error channels. The proposed framework achieves fidelity-level reliability estimation while remaining execution-free, scalable, and interpretable. Experimental results show that our method accurately estimates circuit fidelity, with an average absolute difference (AAD) ranging from 0.031 to 0.069 across diverse circuits and devices.