Toward Consistent High-fidelity Quantum Learning on Unstable Devices via Efficient In-situ Calibration

In the near-term noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era, high noise will significantly reduce the fidelity of quantum computing. Besides, the noise on quantum devices is not stable. This leads to a challenging problem: At run-time, is there a way to efficiently achieve a consistent high-fidelity quantum system on unstable devices? To study this problem, we take quantum learning (a.k.a., variational quantum algorithm) as a vehicle, such as combinatorial optimization and machine learning. A straightforward approach is to optimize a Circuit with a parameter-shift approach on the target quantum device before using it; however, the optimization has an extremely high time cost, which is not practical at run-time. To address the pressing issue, in this paper, we proposed a novel quantum pulse-based noise adaptation framework, namely QuPAD. In the proposed framework, first, we identify that the CNOT gate is the fidelity bottleneck of the conventional VQC, and we employ a more robust parameterized multi-quit gate (i.e., Rzx gate) to replace the CNOT gate. Second, by benchmarking the Rzx gate with different parameters, we build a fitting function for each coupling qubit pair, such that the deviation between the theoretic output of the Rzx gate and its on-device output under a given pulse amplitude and duration can be efficiently predicted. On top of this, an evolutionary algorithm is devised to identify the pulse amplitude and duration of each Rzx gate (i.e., calibration) and find the quantum circuits with high fidelity. Experiments show that the runtime on quantum devices of QuPAD with 8-10 qubits is less than 15 minutes, which is up to 270x faster than the parameter-shift approach. In addition, compared to the vanilla VQC as a baseline, QuPAD can achieve 59.33% accuracy gain on a classification task, and average 66.34% closer to ground state energy for molecular simulation.