Treewidth-Aware Gate Cut Selection for Reducing Transpilation Overhead on Superconducting Quantum Devices

Abstract

On superconducting quantum devices with sparse qubit connectivity, transpilation of long-range two-qubit interactions inserts additional SWAP gates, increasing hardware cost and execution error. Gate cutting via quasi-probability decomposition (QPD) can remove a selected two-qubit gate and thereby reduce routing overhead, but its sampling cost makes cut placement critical. We propose TW2S, a graph-only two-stage gate-cut selection method that operates on the circuit interaction graph without backend-specific transpilation at selection time. Stage 1 analyzes a min-fill elimination trace and scores edges by their contribution to a treewidth upper bound. Stage 2 ranks the resulting candidates by edge betweenness centrality with a degree penalty to identify routing bottlenecks. Across grid, Watts-Strogatz, barbell, and stochastic block model benchmarks transpiled to IBM's FakeSherbrooke backend, TW2S consistently outperforms random cut selection when the interaction graph contains identifiable sparse cuts. The advantage is governed not by absolute graph density but by moderate community structure and accessible inter-community edges. We further derive a mean-squared-error breakeven condition showing that, under a shared total shot budget, QPD is beneficial only when the ECR reduction is large enough and the signal strength is sufficient. Under an expanded per-subcircuit budget the signal-strength requirement is substantially relaxed. In noisy simulations of the J1-J2 transverse-field Ising model, TW2S achieves $\Delta$ECR = 47 for n = 8, compared with approximately 9 for random selection, and yields lower estimation error than the uncut baseline in the tested strong-signal regime, with larger gains at increased shot budgets. These results position graph-structural cut selection as a practical compiler-side tool for turning circuit cutting into a targeted routing-reduction strategy.