QROB: Quantifying Realization Overhead in Quantum Compilation via Reverse Construction

Abstract

Quantum compilation reconciles a program's idealized interaction topology with hardware locality constraints, yet evaluations at scale lack calibrated references for realization overhead. We present QROB, a scalable reverse-construction methodology that generates compilation instances backward from directly realizable configurations, retaining the inverse paths as feasible, compiler-independent references. QROB provides a common evaluation substrate for NISQ SWAP routing and fault-tolerant lattice-surgery scheduling, while extending its reference-preserving principle to capacity-constrained quantum memory-access scheduling. Across systems ranging from 9 to 156 qubits, evaluations highlight QROB's utility as both a diagnostic benchmark and a data source. First, for compiler characterization, QROB reveals substantial realization gaps in existing tools, with NISQ compilers incurring up to 24.1x the reference SWAP cost and fault-tolerant compilers requiring up to 7.0x the reference makespan. Second, as a supervision source for data-driven compilation, a router trained on QROB references outperforms Qiskit SABRE on 84.8% of real-world application circuits. Finally, on real hardware, QROB reference realizations achieve a median mirror-circuit survival rate 1.65x that of full Qiskit O3 compilations across three 156-qubit IBM Heron-r2 processors, demonstrating that closing algorithmic compilation gaps translates directly into physical fidelity gains.