We propose a simple scheme to reduce readout errors in experiments on quantum systems with finite number of measurement outcomes. Our method relies on performing classical post-processing which is preceded by Quantum Detector Tomography, i.e., the reconstruction of a Positive-Operator Valued Measure (POVM) describing the given quantum measurement device. If the measurement device is affected only by an invertible classical noise, it is possible to correct the outcome statistics of future experiments performed on the same device. To support the practical applicability of this scheme for near-term quantum devices, we characterize measurements implemented in IBM's and Rigetti's quantum processors. We find that for these devices, based on superconducting transmon qubits, classical noise is indeed the dominant source of readout errors. Moreover, we analyze the influence of the presence of coherent errors and finite statistics on the performance of our errormitigation procedure. Applying our scheme on the IBM's 5-qubit device, we observe a significant improvement of the results of a number of single-and two-qubit tasks including Quantum State Tomography (QST), Quantum Process Tomography (QPT), the implementation of non-projective measurements, and certain quantum algorithms (Grover's search and the Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm). Finally, we present results showing improvement for the implementation of certain probability distributions in the case of five qubits.

We report an alternative scheme for implementing generalized quantum measurements that does not require the usage of auxiliary system. Our method utilizes solely: (a) classical randomness and post-processing, (b) projective measurements on a relevant quantum system and (c) postselection on non-observing certain outcomes. The scheme implements arbitrary quantum measurement in dimension d with the optimal success probability 1/d. We apply our results to bound the relative power of projective and generalised measurements for unambiguous state discrimination. Finally, we test our scheme experimentally on IBM quantum processor. Interestingly, due to noise involved in the implementation of entangling gates, the quality with which our scheme implements generalized qubit measurements outperforms the standard construction using the auxiliary system.