Practical Fidelity Estimation for Noisy Quantum Devices Using Direct and Survival-Probability-Based Protocols
Abstract
Reliable characterization of quantum states and quantum processes is central to the development of scalable quantum computing. Standard characterization techniques such as full quantum state tomography become rapidly impractical as system size increases. In this work we present two software-oriented fidelity estimation protocols that avoid full tomographic reconstruction while remaining experimentally relevant for noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. The first protocol is direct fidelity estimation (DFE), where the fidelity between a target state and an experimentally prepared state is estimated from importance-sampled Pauli measurements. The second protocol is a survival-probability-based method that reconstructs fidelity from experimentally accessible moments of a noisy evolution and its approximate inverse, and is intrinsically robust against state-preparation-and-measurement (SPAM) errors. We discuss the theoretical basis of both approaches, analyze their noise sensitivity, and present numerical evidence on representative multiqubit states under depolarizing, dephasing, and amplitude-damping channels. For DFE we show that attenuation-aware correction improves robustness against measurement noise. For the survival-probability approach we show that an L2-optimized expansion substantially outperforms naive Taylor truncation in high-noise regimes.
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BibTeX
@misc{aman2026practical,
title = {{Practical Fidelity Estimation for Noisy Quantum Devices Using Direct and Survival-Probability-Based Protocols}},
author = {Ahmed Aman and Kaustav Chatterjee and Younes Javanmard and Tanmoy Pandit},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.21606},
eprint = {2610.21606},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21606},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Practical Fidelity Estimation for Noisy Quantum Devices Using Direct and Survival-Probability-Based Protocols
AU - Ahmed Aman
AU - Kaustav Chatterjee
AU - Younes Javanmard
AU - Tanmoy Pandit
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/15
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.21606
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21606
AB - Reliable characterization of quantum states and quantum processes is central to the development of scalable quantum computing. Standard characterization techniques such as full quantum state tomography become rapidly impractical as system size increases. In this work we present two software-oriented fidelity estimation protocols that avoid full tomographic reconstruction while remaining experimentally relevant for noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. The first protocol is direct fidelity estimation (DFE), where the fidelity between a target state and an experimentally prepared state is estimated from importance-sampled Pauli measurements. The second protocol is a survival-probability-based method that reconstructs fidelity from experimentally accessible moments of a noisy evolution and its approximate inverse, and is intrinsically robust against state-preparation-and-measurement (SPAM) errors. We discuss the theoretical basis of both approaches, analyze their noise sensitivity, and present numerical evidence on representative multiqubit states under depolarizing, dephasing, and amplitude-damping channels. For DFE we show that attenuation-aware correction improves robustness against measurement noise. For the survival-probability approach we show that an L_2-optimized expansion substantially outperforms naive Taylor truncation in high-noise regimes.
ER -