Battle Against Fluctuating Quantum Noise: Compression-Aided Framework to Enable Robust Quantum Neural Network

Abstract: Recently, we have been witnessing the scale-up of superconducting quantum computers; however, the noise of quantum bits (qubits) is still an obstacle for real-world applications to leveraging the power of quantum computing. Although there exist error mitigation or error-aware designs for quantum applications, the inherent fluctuation of noise (a.k.a., instability) can easily collapse the performance of error-aware designs. What's worse, users can even not be aware of the performance degradation caused by the change in noise. To address both issues, in this paper we use Quantum Neural Network (QNN) as a vehicle to present a novel compression-aided framework, namely QuCAD, which will adapt a trained QNN to fluctuating quantum noise. In addition, with the historical calibration (noise) data, our framework will build a model repository offline, which will significantly reduce the optimization time in the online adaption process. Emulation results on an earthquake detection dataset show that QuCAD can achieve 14.91% accuracy gain on average in 146 days over a noise-aware training approach. For the execution on a 7-qubit IBM quantum processor, IBM-Jakarta, QuCAD can consistently achieve 12.52% accuracy gain on earthquake detection.