ADAPT: Mitigating Idling Errors in Qubits via Adaptive Dynamical Decoupling

The fidelity of applications on near-term quantum computers is limited by hardware errors. In addition to errors that occur during gate and measurement operations, a qubit is susceptible to idling errors, which occur when the qubit is idle and not actively undergoing any operations. To mitigate idling errors, prior works in the quantum devices community have proposed Dynamical Decoupling (DD), that reduces stray noise on idle qubits by continuously executing a specific sequence of single-qubit operations that effectively behave as an identity gate. Unfortunately, existing DD protocols have been primarily studied for individual qubits and their efficacy at the application-level is not yet fully understood.

Our experiments show that naively enabling DD for every idle qubit does not necessarily improve fidelity. While DD reduces the idling error-rates for some qubits, it increases the overall error-rate for others due to the additional operations of the DD protocol. Furthermore, idling errors are program-specific and the set of qubits that benefit from DD changes with each program. To enable robust use of DD, we propose Adaptive Dynamical Decoupling (ADAPT), a software framework that estimates the efficacy of DD for each qubit combination and judiciously applies DD only to the subset of qubits that provide the most benefit. ADAPT employs a Decoy Circuit, which is structurally similar to the original program but with a known solution, to identify the DD sequence that maximizes the fidelity. To avoid the exponential search of all possible DD combinations, ADAPT employs a localized algorithm that has linear complexity in the number of qubits. Our experiments on IBM quantum machines (with 16-27 qubits) show that ADAPT improves the application fidelity by 1.86x on average and up-to 5.73x compared to no DD and by 1.2x compared to DD on all qubits.