Error-mitigated data-driven circuit learning on noisy quantum hardware

Application-inspired benchmarks measure how well a quantum device performs meaningful calculations. In the case of parameterized circuit training, the computational task is the preparation of a target quantum state via optimization over a loss landscape. This is complicated by various sources of noise, fixed hardware connectivity, and for generative modeling, the choice of target distribution. Gradient-based training has become a useful benchmarking task for noisy intermediate scale quantum computers because of the additional requirement that the optimization step uses the quantum device to estimate the loss function gradient. In this work we use gradient-based data-driven circuit learning to benchmark the performance of several superconducting platform devices and present results that show how error mitigation can improve the training of quantum circuit Born machines with 28 tunable parameters.