Quantum generative adversarial networks based on a readout error mitigation method with fault tolerant mechanism

Abstract

Readout errors caused by measurement noise are a significant source of errors in quantum circuits, which severely affect the output results and are an urgent problem to be solved in noisy-intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) computing. In this paper, we use the bit-flip averaging (BFA) method to mitigate frequent readout errors in quantum generative adversarial networks (QGAN) for image generation, which simplifies the response matrix structure by averaging the qubits for each random bit-flip in advance, successfully solving problems with high cost of measurement for traditional error mitigation methods. Our experiments were simulated in Qiskit using the handwritten digit image recognition dataset under the BFA-based method, the Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence of the generated images converges to 0.04, 0.05, and 0.1 for readout error probabilities of p = 0.01, p = 0.05, and p = 0.1, respectively. Additionally, by evaluating the fidelity of the quantum states representing the images, we observe average fidelity values of 0.97, 0.96, and 0.95 for the three readout error probabilities, respectively. These results demonstrate the robustness of the model in mitigating readout errors and provide a highly fault tolerant mechanism for image generation models.