A scalable and real-time neural decoder for topological quantum codes

Andrew W. Senior, Thomas Edlich, Francisco J.H. Heras, Lei M. Zhang, Oscar Higgott, James S. Spencer, Taylor Applebaum, Sam Blackwell, Justin Ledford, Akvilė Žemgulytė, Augustin Žídek, Noah Shutty, Andrew Cowie, Yin Li, George Holland, Peter Brooks, Charlie Beattie, Michael Newman, Alex Davies, Cody Jones, et al (4) (Dec 09 2025).

Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum computing will require error rates far below those achievable with physical qubits. Quantum error correction (QEC) bridges this gap, but depends on decoders being simultaneously fast, accurate, and scalable. This combination of requirements has not yet been met by a machine-learning decoder, nor by any decoder for promising resource-efficient codes such as the colour code. Here we introduce AlphaQubit 2, a neural-network decoder that achieves near-optimal logical error rates for both surface and colour codes at large scales under realistic noise. For the colour code, it is orders of magnitude faster than other high-accuracy decoders. For the surface code, we demonstrate real-time decoding faster than 1 microsecond per cycle up to distance 11 on current commercial accelerators with better accuracy than leading real-time decoders. These results support the practical application of a wider class of promising QEC codes, and establish a credible path towards high-accuracy, real-time neural decoding at the scales required for fault-tolerant quantum computation.

Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07737