• Accepted Paper

Compressed-sensing shadow tomography

Joseph Barreto and Daniel Lidar

Phys. Rev. A - Accepted 21 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/6v9t-c5h4

Abstract

Estimating many local expectation values over time is a central measurement bottleneck in quantum simulation and device characterization. We study the task of reconstructing the Pauli-signal matrix Sij=Tr(Oiρ(tj)) for a collection of M low-weight Pauli observables {Oi}i=1M over N timesteps {tj}j=1N, while minimizing the total number of device shots. We propose a (CSST) protocol that combines two complementary reductions. First, local classical shadows reduce the observable dimension by enabling many Pauli expectation values to be estimated from the same randomized snapshots at a fixed time. Second, compressed sensing reduces the time dimension by exploiting the fact that many expectation-value traces are spectrally sparse or compressible in a unitary (e.g., Fourier) transform basis. Operationally, CSST samples m≪N timesteps uniformly at random, collects shadows only at those times, and then reconstructs each length-N signal via standard ℓ1-based recovery in the unitary transform domain. We provide end-to-end guarantees that explicitly combine shadow estimation error with compressed sensing recovery bounds. For exactly s-sparse signals in a unitary transform basis, we show that m=𝒪(slog2slogN) random timesteps suffice (with high probability), leading to total-shot savings scaling as Θ̃(N/s) (i.e., up to polylogarithmic factors) relative to collecting shadows at all N timesteps. For approximately sparse signals, the reconstruction error decomposes into a compressibility (tail) term plus a noise term. We present numerical experiments on noisy many-qubit dynamics that support strong Fourier compressibility of Pauli traces and demonstrate substantial shot reductions with accurate reconstruction.

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