The winner's curse in hardware VQE: drift-differenced remeasurement of finite-shot selection bias
Abstract
Finite-shot optimization can make noisy variational quantum eigensolver energies look artificially accurate. We studied six hardware-tractable molecular active spaces on two IBM Heron r3 processors. Seven optimizer-selected values fell below the exact active-space eigenvalue by up to 17.36 mHa. The cell-balanced fraction of the source-observed best-final advantage not retained on later fixed-parameter measurement was 0.989 (approximate 95% session-level interval [0.906, 1.072]); alternative aggregations span 0.892-0.989. Thus little of the selected advantage remained on average. Measurements occurred 5.6-38.4 days later, so parameter-dependent drift remains a competing explanation. Best-observed hardware VQE values require prompt independent confirmation before supporting accuracy claims.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{larrucea2026winners,
title = {{The winner's curse in hardware VQE: drift-differenced remeasurement of finite-shot selection bias}},
author = {Julen Larrucea},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.27704},
eprint = {2609.27704},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27704},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The winner's curse in hardware VQE: drift-differenced remeasurement of finite-shot selection bias
AU - Julen Larrucea
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.27704
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27704
AB - Finite-shot optimization can make noisy variational quantum eigensolver energies look artificially accurate. We studied six hardware-tractable molecular active spaces on two IBM Heron r3 processors. Seven optimizer-selected values fell below the exact active-space eigenvalue by up to 17.36 mHa. The cell-balanced fraction of the source-observed best-final advantage not retained on later fixed-parameter measurement was 0.989 (approximate 95% session-level interval [0.906, 1.072]); alternative aggregations span 0.892-0.989. Thus little of the selected advantage remained on average. Measurements occurred 5.6-38.4 days later, so parameter-dependent drift remains a competing explanation. Best-observed hardware VQE values require prompt independent confirmation before supporting accuracy claims.
ER -