StableShots: Online Shot Stopping for Quantum Circuit Execution

2026-06-20

AI Summary

This work addresses the inefficiency of fixed shot counts in quantum circuit execution, which often leads to either undersampling or unnecessary resource expenditure. The authors propose a black-box, online adaptive stopping mechanism that requires no prior knowledge: by incrementally sampling in batches and continuously monitoring the total variation distance (TVD) between successive empirical distributions, the method automatically halts measurement upon detecting local stability. This approach constitutes the first online shot-adaptive control strategy tailored for static quantum circuits. Evaluated on 180 QSimBench benchmarks, it achieves a median of 7,650 shots to reach TVD ≤ 0.05, substantially outperforming fixed-shot baselines and striking an effective balance between accuracy and computational efficiency.

Abstract

Quantum circuit execution estimates output distributions by repeated measurements, yet developers commonly choose a fixed shot budget before execution. This static choice is brittle: low budgets can under-sample the distribution, while high budgets waste measurements. In this paper, we present StableShots, a black-box online stopping rule for static quantum circuits. The method executes a fixed circuit in small batches, monitors the total-variation distance between cumulative empirical distributions, and stops after repeated evidence of local stability. We evaluate StableShots on 180 QSimBench traces spanning six circuit families, six sizes from 4 to 14 qubits, and five noisy IBM simulated backends. With validation-only calibration and 100 repeated backend-holdout splits, the selected configuration reaches TVD <= 0.05 on all held-out test evaluations with median 7,650 shots, whereas fixed-shot baselines either fail more often or spend substantially more shots.

Problem

• quantum circuit execution
• shot budget
• output distribution
• measurement efficiency
• static allocation

Innovation

• online stopping
• quantum circuit execution
• total variation distance
• adaptive shot allocation
• black-box method