Error Mitigation of Fault-Tolerant Quantum Circuits with Soft Information
Quantum error mitigation (QEM) is typically viewed as a suite of practical techniques for today's noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, with limited relevance once fault-tolerant quantum computers become available. In this work, we challenge this conventional wisdom by showing that QEM can continue to provide substantial benefits in the era of quantum error correction (QEC), and in an even more efficient manner than it does on current devices. We introduce a framework for logical-level QEM that leverages soft information naturally produced by QEC decoders, requiring no additional data, hardware modifications, or runtime overhead beyond what QEC protocols already provide. Within this framework, we develop and analyze three logical-level QEM techniques: post-selection and runtime abort policies, probabilistic error cancellation, and zero-noise extrapolation. Our techniques reduce logical error rates by more than 100x while discarding fewer than 0.1% of shots; they also provide in situ characterization of logical channels for QEM protocols. As a proof of principle, we benchmark our approach using a surface-code architecture and two state-of-the-art decoders based on tensor-network contraction and minimum-weight perfect matching. We evaluate logical-level QEM on random Clifford circuits and molecular simulation algorithms and find that, compared to previous approaches relying on QEC only or QEC combined with QEM, we can achieve up to 87.4% spacetime overhead savings. Our results demonstrate that logical-level QEM with QEC decoder soft information can reliably improve logical performance, underscoring the efficiency and usefulness of QEM techniques for fault-tolerant quantum computers.