Designing a Machine Learning-Driven, Cross-Hardware Emulator for Noisy Quantum Computers with Gate-Based Protocols

Quantum computer emulators model the behavior and error rates of specific quantum processors. Without accurate noise models in these emulators, it is challenging for users to optimize and debug executable quantum programs prior to running them on the quantum computer, as device-specific noise is not properly accounted for. To overcome this challenge, we design a machine learning (ML)-driven approach to construct approximate device-specific emulators that applies to different hardware platforms. We apply supervised ML on a pre-generated library containing simulated gate set tomography training data. The ML model then analyses gate set tomography data from a target quantum computer to predict its noise model, which is in turn used to construct the device-specific emulator. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our protocol’s emulator in estimating the unitary coupled cluster energy of the H2 molecule and compare the results with those from actual quantum hardware. Remarkably, our noise model captures device noise with high accuracy, achieving a percentage relative error of just 0.128% in expectation value relative to the actual quantum hardware. Importantly, we show that even without access to pulse-level control, noise from the quantum computer can nonetheless be characterized and independently validated by our protocol.