StableShots: Online Shot Stopping for Quantum Circuit Execution
This work addresses the problem of inefficient shot allocation in quantum circuit execution, providing a practical solution for developers to reduce measurement waste while ensuring distribution accuracy.
StableShots introduces an online stopping rule for quantum circuit execution that adaptively determines the number of shots needed, achieving a total variation distance <= 0.05 on all test evaluations with a median of 7,650 shots, outperforming fixed-shot baselines that either fail more often or require substantially more shots.
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.