Papers › Error-rate-agnostic decoding of topological stabilizer codes

Error-rate-agnostic decoding of topological stabilizer codes

3 Dec 2021arXiv:2112.01977links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Karl Hammar, Alexei Orekhov, Patrik Wallin Hybelius, Anna Katariina Wisakanto, Basudha Srivastava, Anton Frisk Kockum, Mats Granath

The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.

Efficient high-performance decoding of topological stabilizer codes has the potential to crucially improve the balance between logical failure rates and the number and individual error rates of the constituent qubits. High-threshold maximum-likelihood decoders require an explicit error model for Pauli errors to decode a specific syndrome, whereas lower-threshold heuristic approaches such as minimum weight matching are "error agnostic". Here we consider an intermediate approach, formulating a decoder that depends on the bias, i.e., the relative probability of phase-flip to bit-flip errors, but is agnostic to error rate. Our decoder is based on counting the number and effective weight of the most likely error chains in each equivalence class of a given syndrome. We use Metropolis-based Monte Carlo sampling to explore the space of error chains and find unique chains, that are efficiently identified using a hash table. Using the error-rate invariance the decoder can sample chains effectively at an error rate which is higher than the physical error rate and without the need for "thermalization" between chains in different equivalence classes. Applied to the surface code and the XZZX code, the decoder matches maximum-likelihood decoders for moderate code sizes or low error rates. We anticipate that, because of the compressed information content per syndrome, it can be taken full advantage of in combination with machine-learning methods to extrapolate Monte Carlo-generated data.

PaperPDFCode

Code

QEC-project-2020/EWD-QEC officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections