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Paper 1

Optimizing short stabilizer codes for asymmetric channels

Alex Rigby, JC Olivier, Peter Jarvis

Year
2019
Journal
arXiv preprint
DOI
arXiv:1911.04196
arXiv
1911.04196

For a number of quantum channels of interest, phase-flip errors occur far more frequently than bit-flip errors. When transmitting across these asymmetric channels, the decoding error rate can be reduced by tailoring the code used to the channel. However, analyzing the performance of stabilizer codes on these channels is made difficult by the #P-completeness of optimal decoding. To address this, at least for short codes, we demonstrate that the decoding error rate can be approximated by considering only a fraction of the possible errors caused by the channel. Using this approximate error rate calculation, we extend a recent result to show that there are a number of $[[5\leq n\leq12,1\leq k\leq3]]$ cyclic stabilizer codes that perform well on two different asymmetric channels. We also demonstrate that an indication of a stabilizer code's error rate is given by considering the error rate of a classical binary code related to the stabilizer. This classical error rate is far less complex to calculate, and we use it as the basis for a hill climbing algorithm, which we show to be effective at optimizing codes for asymmetric channels. Furthermore, we demonstrate that simple modifications can be made to our hill climbing algorithm to search for codes with desired structure requirements.

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Paper 2

ADaPT: Adaptive-window Decoding for Practical fault-Tolerance

Tina Oberoi, Joshua Viszlai, Frederic T. Chong

Year
2026
Journal
arXiv preprint
DOI
arXiv:2605.01149
arXiv
2605.01149

Window decoding, first proposed to reduce decoding complexity for real-time decoding, is an essential component to realize scalable, universal-fault tolerant computation. Prior work has focused on improving throughput through parallelization and reducing reaction time via speculation on window boundaries. However, these methods use a fixed window size d, paying a fixed decoding time overhead for each window. In practice, we find this overhead of a fixed window size unnecessary in many cases due to the sparsity of average-case errors in QEC. Leveraging this insight, in this paper we propose an adaptive window decoding technique based on decoder confidence. This technique reduces the overhead in decoding time thus reducing reaction time without compromising on logical error rates. We benchmark adaptive window decoding across different codes and hardware inspired noise models. Our results show that this adaptive technique reaches the target error rate while maintaining a low decoding time overhead across different codes, and under different noise models.

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