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Paper 1
Hardness of decoding quantum stabilizer codes
Pavithran Iyer, David Poulin
- Year
- 2013
- Journal
- arXiv preprint
- DOI
- arXiv:1310.3235
- arXiv
- 1310.3235
In this article we address the computational hardness of optimally decoding a quantum stabilizer code. Much like classical linear codes, errors are detected by measuring certain check operators which yield an error syndrome, and the decoding problem consists of determining the most likely recovery given the syndrome. The corresponding classical problem is known to be NP-complete, and a similar decoding problem for quantum codes is also known to be NP-complete. However, this decoding strategy is not optimal in the quantum setting as it does not take into account error degeneracy, which causes distinct errors to have the same effect on the code. Here, we show that optimal decoding of stabilizer codes is computationally much harder than optimal decoding of classical linear codes, it is #P.
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Lottery BP: Unlocking Quantum Error Decoding at Scale
Yanzhang Zhu, Chen-Yu Peng, Yun Hao Chen, Yeong-Luh Ueng, Di Wu
- Year
- 2026
- Journal
- arXiv preprint
- DOI
- arXiv:2605.00038
- arXiv
- 2605.00038
To enable fault tolerance on millions of qubits in real time, scalable decoding is necessary, which motivates this paper. Existing decoding algorithms (decoders), such as clustering, matching, belief propagation (BP), and neural networks, suffer from one or more of inaccuracy, costliness, and incompatibility, upon a broad set of quantum error correction codes, such as surface code, toric code, and bivariate bicycle code. Therefore, there exists a gap between existing decoders and an ideal decoder that is accurate, fast, general, and scalable simultaneously. This paper contributes in three aspects, including decoder, decoder architecture, and decoding simulator. First, we propose Lottery BP, a decoder that introduces randomness during decoding. Lottery BP improves the decoding accuracy over BP by 2~8 orders of magnitude for topological codes. To efficiently decode multi-round measurement errors, we propose syndrome vote as a pre-processing step before Lottery BP, which compresses multiple rounds of syndromes into one. Syndrome vote increases the latency margin of decoding and mitigates the backlog problem. Second, we design a PolyQec architecture that implements Lottery BP as a local decoder and ordered statistics decoding (OSD) as a global decoder, and it is configurable for surface/toric code and X/Z check. Since Lottery BP boosts the local decoding accuracy, PolyQec invokes the costly global OSD decoder less frequently over BP+OSD to enhance the scalability, e.g., 3~5 orders of magnitude less for topological codes. Third, to evaluate decoders fairly, we develop a PyTorch-based decoding simulator, Syndrilla, that modularizes the simulation pipeline and allows to extend new decoders flexibly. We formulate multiple metrics to quantify the performance of decoders and integrate them in Syndrilla. Running on GPUs, Syndrilla is 1~2 orders of magnitude faster than CPUs.
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