Basis-Adaptive Sparse-State Simulation of Quantum Circuits
Classical simulation of many-body quantum systems remains economical only when wavefunction amplitudes stay localized in the working basis. Fixed-basis sparse-state simulators scale memory as $\mathcal{O}(k)$ by keeping the largest computational-basis amplitudes; however, fidelity drops once entanglement or basis rotations spread weight across the Hilbert space. In this work, we introduce an algorithm called Basis-Adaptive Sparse-State Simulation (BASS), which updates each qubit's local representation basis during execution rather than locking the computational basis for the entire circuit. Before truncation, each qubit is rotated into the eigenbasis of its single-qubit reduced density matrix, following the natural-orbital idea from quantum chemistry, so the retained amplitudes stay clustered. We prove that top-$k$ selection is uniquely optimal for one-step truncation in any fixed basis and that the one-body reduced-density-matrix eigenbasis is a stationary product basis for the inverse participation ratio (PR), with a residual bounded by local entanglement coherence. We perform a systematic benchmarking over a variety of quantum circuits and demonstrate that the ratio \(k/\text{PR}_Z\) (sparse budget over computational participation ratio) serves as an indicator for regimes in which adaptive measurement bases provide a performance advantage. On structured brickwork circuits, BASS achieves substantially higher fidelity than the fixed-basis approach, while incurring only a moderate increase in wall-clock time in the memory-limited regime. Moreover, for disordered Ising circuits, BASS systematically provides an improvement of approximately one order of magnitude in state overlap at a fixed computational budget.