MCMit: Mid-Circuit Measurement Error Mitigation

TL;DR

MCMit is a hardware-software co-design that significantly reduces mid-circuit measurement errors and latency in quantum computing, enhancing circuit fidelity and error correction performance.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable hardware instruction and advanced discriminators, along with software techniques, to mitigate measurement errors and latency in quantum circuits.

Findings

Feedback latency reduced by up to 70%

Circuit depths improved by up to 7x

Logical error rates decreased by up to 80%

Abstract

Distributed Quantum Computing (DQC) and Quantum Error Correction (QEC) rely on dynamic circuits that include Mid-Circuit Measurements (MCMs) and classical feedback. These operations present a major bottleneck: MCMs suffer from high error rates that lead to real-time branching errors, while MCM and classical feedback latencies amplify decoherence errors. Current hardware controllers, qubit-state discriminators, and software error mitigation techniques fail to address these challenges holistically. We propose MCMit, a hardware-software co-design to mitigate branching and latency-induced errors. MCMit introduces a scalable, constant-latency multi-control branch instruction for faster classical feedback and two qubit-state discriminators, a transformer, and a CNN, with high accuracy even under short measurement durations. On the software side, static MCM elimination and stochastic branching complement the hardware by mitigating residual branching errors that persist despite hardware improvements. We implement MCMit on Qubic and evaluate it using experimentally extracted QPU readout traces. Our branch instruction reduces feedback latency by up to 70\%, improving circuit depths by up to $7\times$ over Qubic. Our CNN discriminator achieves 37-73\% higher accuracy for short measurement durations than the baselines, leading to up to 80\% lower logical error rates in QEC. Last, our software mitigation improves fidelity by 18--30\% over baseline methods.