QROB: Quantifying Realization Overhead in Quantum Compilation via Reverse Construction
Abstract
Quantum compilation reconciles a program's idealized interaction topology with hardware locality constraints, yet evaluations at scale lack calibrated references for realization overhead. We present QROB, a scalable reverse-construction methodology that generates compilation instances backward from directly realizable configurations, retaining the inverse paths as feasible, compiler-independent references. QROB provides a common evaluation substrate for NISQ SWAP routing and fault-tolerant lattice-surgery scheduling, while extending its reference-preserving principle to capacity-constrained quantum memory-access scheduling. Across systems ranging from 9 to 156 qubits, evaluations highlight QROB's utility as both a diagnostic benchmark and a data source. First, for compiler characterization, QROB reveals substantial realization gaps in existing tools, with NISQ compilers incurring up to 24.1x the reference SWAP cost and fault-tolerant compilers requiring up to 7.0x the reference makespan. Second, as a supervision source for data-driven compilation, a router trained on QROB references outperforms Qiskit SABRE on 84.8% of real-world application circuits. Finally, on real hardware, QROB reference realizations achieve a median mirror-circuit survival rate 1.65x that of full Qiskit O3 compilations across three 156-qubit IBM Heron-r2 processors, demonstrating that closing algorithmic compilation gaps translates directly into physical fidelity gains.
Related
- Quantum circuit compilation with constant overhead
- Quantifying Teleportation Overhead in Distributed Unitary Coupled-Cluster Ansätze
- Algorithmic Construction of Gapped Boundaries for Topological Stabilizer Codes: A Route to Low-Overhead Planar qLDPC Codes
- Purely-logarithmic-time- and constant-space-overhead fault-tolerant quantum computation
- Scalable long-distance quantum fan-out gates with reduced resource overhead
BibTeX
@misc{li2026qrob,
title = {{QROB: Quantifying Realization Overhead in Quantum Compilation via Reverse Construction}},
author = {Jintao Li and Kaiqi Li and Rui Wang and Yilun Zhao and Kaixuan Huang and Ying Wang and Jialin Zhang and Zheng-An Wang and Xiaoming Sun and Heng Fan},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.07776},
eprint = {2609.07776},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07776},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - QROB: Quantifying Realization Overhead in Quantum Compilation via Reverse Construction
AU - Jintao Li
AU - Kaiqi Li
AU - Rui Wang
AU - Yilun Zhao
AU - Kaixuan Huang
AU - Ying Wang
AU - Jialin Zhang
AU - Zheng-An Wang
AU - Xiaoming Sun
AU - Heng Fan
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/07
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.07776
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07776
AB - Quantum compilation reconciles a program's idealized interaction topology with hardware locality constraints, yet evaluations at scale lack calibrated references for realization overhead. We present QROB, a scalable reverse-construction methodology that generates compilation instances backward from directly realizable configurations, retaining the inverse paths as feasible, compiler-independent references. QROB provides a common evaluation substrate for NISQ SWAP routing and fault-tolerant lattice-surgery scheduling, while extending its reference-preserving principle to capacity-constrained quantum memory-access scheduling. Across systems ranging from 9 to 156 qubits, evaluations highlight QROB's utility as both a diagnostic benchmark and a data source. First, for compiler characterization, QROB reveals substantial realization gaps in existing tools, with NISQ compilers incurring up to 24.1x the reference SWAP cost and fault-tolerant compilers requiring up to 7.0x the reference makespan. Second, as a supervision source for data-driven compilation, a router trained on QROB references outperforms Qiskit SABRE on 84.8% of real-world application circuits. Finally, on real hardware, QROB reference realizations achieve a median mirror-circuit survival rate 1.65x that of full Qiskit O3 compilations across three 156-qubit IBM Heron-r2 processors, demonstrating that closing algorithmic compilation gaps translates directly into physical fidelity gains.
ER -