_version_ 1866913069946372096
author Cao, Shuxiang
Zhang, Zijian
Agarwal, Abhishek
Bratrud, Grace
Beysengulov, Niyaz R.
Cole, Daniel C.
Frieiro, Alejandro Gómez
Glen, Elena O.
Hsu, Hao
Huang, Gang
Jow, Raymond
Shaji, Greshma
Lubowe, Tom
Zhu, Ligeng
Calderón, Luis Mantilla
Pancotti, Nicola
Pendleton, Joel
Severin, Brandon
Staub, Charles Etienne
Sussman, Sara
Vepsäläinen, Antti
Vora, Neel Rajeshbhai
Xu, Yilun
Bernales, Varinia
Bowring, Daniel
Kyoseva, Elica
Rungger, Ivan
Semeghini, Giulia
Stanwyck, Sam
Costa, Timothy
Aspuru-Guzik, Alán
Svore, Krysta
author_facet Cao, Shuxiang
Zhang, Zijian
Agarwal, Abhishek
Bratrud, Grace
Beysengulov, Niyaz R.
Cole, Daniel C.
Frieiro, Alejandro Gómez
Glen, Elena O.
Hsu, Hao
Huang, Gang
Jow, Raymond
Shaji, Greshma
Lubowe, Tom
Zhu, Ligeng
Calderón, Luis Mantilla
Pancotti, Nicola
Pendleton, Joel
Severin, Brandon
Staub, Charles Etienne
Sussman, Sara
Vepsäläinen, Antti
Vora, Neel Rajeshbhai
Xu, Yilun
Bernales, Varinia
Bowring, Daniel
Kyoseva, Elica
Rungger, Ivan
Semeghini, Giulia
Stanwyck, Sam
Costa, Timothy
Aspuru-Guzik, Alán
Svore, Krysta
contents Quantum computing calibration depends on interpreting experimental data, and calibration plots provide the most universal human-readable representation for this task, yet no systematic evaluation exists of how well vision-language models (VLMs) interpret them. We introduce QCalEval, the first VLM benchmark for quantum calibration plots: 243 samples across 87 scenario types from 22 experiment families, spanning superconducting qubits and neutral atoms, evaluated on six question types in both zero-shot and in-context learning settings. The best general-purpose zero-shot model reaches a mean score of 72.3, and many open-weight models degrade under multi-image in-context learning, whereas frontier closed models improve substantially. A supervised fine-tuning ablation at the 9-billion-parameter scale shows that SFT improves zero-shot performance but cannot close the multimodal in-context learning gap. As a reference case study, we release NVIDIA Ising Calibration 1, an open-weight model based on Qwen3.5-35B-A3B that reaches 74.7 zero-shot average score.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_25884
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle QCalEval: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Quantum Calibration Plot Understanding
Cao, Shuxiang
Zhang, Zijian
Agarwal, Abhishek
Bratrud, Grace
Beysengulov, Niyaz R.
Cole, Daniel C.
Frieiro, Alejandro Gómez
Glen, Elena O.
Hsu, Hao
Huang, Gang
Jow, Raymond
Shaji, Greshma
Lubowe, Tom
Zhu, Ligeng
Calderón, Luis Mantilla
Pancotti, Nicola
Pendleton, Joel
Severin, Brandon
Staub, Charles Etienne
Sussman, Sara
Vepsäläinen, Antti
Vora, Neel Rajeshbhai
Xu, Yilun
Bernales, Varinia
Bowring, Daniel
Kyoseva, Elica
Rungger, Ivan
Semeghini, Giulia
Stanwyck, Sam
Costa, Timothy
Aspuru-Guzik, Alán
Svore, Krysta
Quantum Physics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Quantum computing calibration depends on interpreting experimental data, and calibration plots provide the most universal human-readable representation for this task, yet no systematic evaluation exists of how well vision-language models (VLMs) interpret them. We introduce QCalEval, the first VLM benchmark for quantum calibration plots: 243 samples across 87 scenario types from 22 experiment families, spanning superconducting qubits and neutral atoms, evaluated on six question types in both zero-shot and in-context learning settings. The best general-purpose zero-shot model reaches a mean score of 72.3, and many open-weight models degrade under multi-image in-context learning, whereas frontier closed models improve substantially. A supervised fine-tuning ablation at the 9-billion-parameter scale shows that SFT improves zero-shot performance but cannot close the multimodal in-context learning gap. As a reference case study, we release NVIDIA Ising Calibration 1, an open-weight model based on Qwen3.5-35B-A3B that reaches 74.7 zero-shot average score.
title QCalEval: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Quantum Calibration Plot Understanding
topic Quantum Physics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25884