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Paper 1

Calibration-Conditioned FiLM Decoders for Low-Latency Decoding of Quantum Error Correction Evaluated on IBM Repetition-Code Experiments

Samuel Stein, Shuwen Kan, Chenxu Liu, Adrian Harkness, Sean Garner, Zefan Du, Yufei Ding, Ying Mao, Ang Li

Year

2026

Journal

arXiv preprint

DOI

arXiv:2601.16123

arXiv

2601.16123

Real-time decoding of quantum error correction (QEC) is essential for enabling fault-tolerant quantum computation. A practical decoder must operate with high accuracy at low latency, while remaining robust to spatial and temporal variations in hardware noise. We introduce a hardware-conditioned neural decoder framework designed to exploit the natural separation of timescales in superconducting processors, where calibration drifts occur over hours while error correction requires microsecond-scale responses. By processing calibration data through a graph-based encoder and conditioning a lightweight convolutional backbone via feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM), we decouple the heavy processing of device statistics from the low-latency syndrome decoding. We evaluate this approach using the 1D repetition code as a testbed on IBM Fez, Kingston, and Pittsburgh processors, collecting over 2.7 million experimental shots spanning distances up to d = 11. We demonstrate that a single trained model generalizes to unseen qubit chains and new calibration data acquired days later without retraining. On these unseen experiments, the FiLM-conditioned decoder achieves up to an 11.1x reduction in logical error rate relative to modified minimum-weight perfect matching. We observe that by employing a network architecture that exploits the highly asynchronous nature of system calibration and decoding, hardware-conditioned neural decoding demonstrates promising, adaptive performance with negligible latency overhead relative to unconditioned baselines.

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Paper 2

Toward Uncertainty-Aware and Generalizable Neural Decoding for Quantum LDPC Codes

Xiangjun Mi, Frank Mueller

Year

2025

Journal

arXiv preprint

DOI

arXiv:2510.06257

arXiv

2510.06257

Quantum error correction (QEC) is essential for scalable quantum computing, yet decoding errors via conventional algorithms result in limited accuracy (i.e., suppression of logical errors) and high overheads, both of which can be alleviated by inference-based decoders. To date, such machine-learning (ML) decoders lack two key properties crucial for practical fault tolerance: reliable uncertainty quantification and robust generalization to previously unseen codes. To address this gap, we propose \textbf{QuBA}, a Bayesian graph neural decoder that integrates attention to both dot-product and multi-head, enabling expressive error-pattern recognition alongside calibrated uncertainty estimates. Building on QuBA, we further develop \textbf{SAGU }\textbf{(Sequential Aggregate Generalization under Uncertainty)}, a multi-code training framework with enhanced cross-domain robustness enabling decoding beyond the training set. Experiments on bivariate bicycle (BB) codes and their coprime variants demonstrate that (i) both QuBA and SAGU consistently outperform the classical baseline belief propagation (BP), achieving a reduction of on average \emph{one order of magnitude} in logical error rate (LER), and up to \emph{two orders of magnitude} under confident-decision bounds on the coprime BB code $[[154, 6, 16]]$; (ii) QuBA also surpasses state-of-the-art neural decoders, providing an advantage of roughly \emph{one order of magnitude} (e.g., for the larger BB code $[[756, 16, \leq34]]$) even when considering conservative (safe) decision bounds; (iii) SAGU achieves decoding performance comparable to or even outperforming QuBA's domain-specific training approach.

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