Physics-Guided Linear Mapper for Quantum Error Mitigation

Abstract

We introduce a novel physics-guided linear mapper (PGLM) for quantum error mitigation that uses seven distinct interpretable features derived from circuit complexity and device calibration data. The goal is to provide a data-efficient, interpretable, and low-latency alternative to the black-box machine learning for quantum error mitigation in noisy-intermediate scale quantum devices. Evaluated on 52 simulated benchmark circuits (1--4 qubits), PGLM demonstrates strong performance in noise-accumulation regimes: 50.1% RMSE reduction on 3-qubit circuits and 32.3% on 4-qubit circuits, while single-qubit circuits show degraded performance. A circuit-size-aware deployment policy achieves 32.6% aggregate improvement. Sub-millisecond inference enables integration into variational algorithms, and analysis of learned coefficients reveals that circuit depth and CNOT count dominate error prediction, consistent with decoherence mechanisms. Results are simulator-based with idealized noise models; hardware validation remains essential future work.

18 pages, 7 figures. Published in Intelligent Computing: Proceedings of the 2026 Computing Conference, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol. 1949, Springer, 2026