  We present Context Aware Fidelity Estimation (CAFE), a framework for
benchmarking quantum operations that offers several practical advantages over
existing methods such as Randomized Benchmarking (RB) and Cross-Entropy
Benchmarking (XEB). In CAFE, a gate or a subcircuit from some target experiment
is repeated n times before being measured. By using a subcircuit, we account
for effects from spatial and temporal circuit context. Since coherent errors
accumulate quadratically while incoherent errors grow linearly, we can separate
them by fitting the measured fidelity as a function of n. One can additionally
interleave the subcircuit with dynamical decoupling sequences to remove certain
coherent error sources from the characterization when desired. We have used
CAFE to experimentally validate our single- and two-qubit unitary
characterizations by measuring fidelity against estimated unitaries. In
numerical simulations, we find CAFE produces fidelity estimates at least as
accurate as Interleaved RB while using significantly fewer resources. We also
introduce a compact formulation for preparing an arbitrary two-qubit state with
a single entangling operation, and use it to present a concrete example using
CAFE to study CZ gates in parallel on a Sycamore processor.
