A noise-resilient and configurable approximate quantum multiplier for enhanced computation fidelity on NISQ devices

초록

Quantum arithmetic circuits, such as adders and multipliers, are essential for many quantum algorithms, but their practical deployment on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices remains challenging due to limited coherence times and high gate error rates. In this paper, we propose Qaradox, a configurable approximate quantum multiplier architecture that achieves higher computation accuracy than its exact counterpart under realistic quantum noise. The proposed architecture introduces a novel class of controlled quantum adders that enable flexible combinations of exact, approximate, and truncated operations, allowing the quantum circuit to be tailored to hardware-specific noise characteristics. Experimental results using IBM's 127-qubit Brisbane noise model show that Qaradox reduces the error rate (ER), normalized mean error distance (NMED), and mean relative error distance (MRED) by up to 23.7%, 80.3%, and 88.1%, respectively, compared to the fully exact multiplier. Furthermore, when applied to image sharpening, the proposed architecture improves peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) by more than three times and increases structural similarity index measure (SSIM) from 0.00 to 0.83, effectively recovering visual quality lost in exact designs. These results demonstrate that approximation, when applied structurally and selectively, can enhance both robustness and correctness in quantum arithmetic for NISQ-era systems.

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