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arXiv:2512.07057

Beam search decoder for quantum LDPC codes

Min Ye, Dave Wecker, Nicolas Delfosse

quant-phcs.ITSubmitted Dec 8, 2025• Announced Dec 9, 2025• 0 citations• Revised Dec 17, 2025 (v2)
v1 · Dec 8, 2025v2 · Dec 17, 2025
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Abstract

We propose a decoder for quantum low density parity check (LDPC) codes based on a beam search heuristic guided by belief propagation (BP). Our beam search decoder applies to all quantum LDPC codes and achieves different speed-accuracy tradeoffs by tuning its parameters such as the beam width. We perform numerical simulations under circuit level noise for the $[[144, 12, 12]]$ bivariate bicycle (BB) code at noise rate $p=10^{-3}$ to estimate the logical error rate and the 99.9 percentile runtime and we compare with the BP-OSD decoder which has been the default quantum LDPC decoder for the past six years. A variant of our beam search decoder with a beam width of 64 achieves a $17\times$ reduction in logical error rate. With a beam width of 8, we reach the same logical error rate as BP-OSD with a $26.2\times$ reduction in the 99.9 percentile runtime. We identify the beam search decoder with beam width of 32 as a promising candidate for trapped ion architectures because it achieves a $5.6\times$ reduction in logical error rate with a 99.9 percentile runtime per syndrome extraction round below 1ms at $p=5 \times10^{-4}$. Remarkably, this is achieved in software on a single core, without any parallelization or specialized hardware (FPGA, ASIC), suggesting one might only need three 32-core CPUs to decode a trapped ion quantum computer with 1000 logical qubits.

Comments
We have released the implementation source code at https://github.com/ionq-publications/BeamSearchDecoder

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We propose a decoder for quantum low density parity check (LDPC) codes based on a beam search heuristic guided by belief propagation (BP). Our beam search decoder applies to all quantum LDPC codes and achieves different speed-accuracy tradeoffs by tuning its parameters such as the beam width. We perform numerical simulations under circuit level noise for the [[144,12,12]][[144, 12, 12]][[144,12,12]] bivariate bicycle (BB) code at noise rate p=10−3p=10^{-3}p=10−3 to estimate the logical error rate and the 99.9 percentile runtime and we compare with the BP-OSD decoder which has been the default quantum LDPC decoder for the past six years. A variant of our beam search decoder with a beam width of 64 achieves a 17×17\times17× reduction in logical error rate. With a beam width of 8, we reach the same logical error rate as BP-OSD with a 26.2×26.2\times26.2× reduction in the 99.9 percentile runtime. We identify the beam search decoder with beam width of 32 as a promising candidate for trapped ion architectures because it achieves a 5.6×5.6\times5.6× reduction in logical error rate with a 99.9 percentile runtime per syndrome extraction round below 1ms at p=5×10−4p=5 \times10^{-4}p=5×10−4. Remarkably, this is achieved in software on a single core, without any parallelization or specialized hardware (FPGA, ASIC), suggesting one might only need three 32-core CPUs to decode a trapped ion quantum computer with 1000 logical qubits.
We propose a decoder for quantum low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes based on a beam search heuristic guided by belief propagation (BP). Our beam search decoder applies to all quantum LDPC codes and achieves different speed-accuracy tradeoffs by tuning its parameters such as the beam width. We perform numerical simulations under circuit level noise for the [ [ 144 , 12 , 12 ] ] bivariate bicycle (BB) code at noise rate p = 10 − 3 to estimate the logical error rate and the 99.9 percentile runtime and we compare with the BP-OSD decoder which has been the default quantum LDPC decoder for the past six years. A variant of our beam search decoder with a beam width of 64 achieves a 17 × reduction in logical error rate. With a beam width of 8, we reach the same logical error rate as BP-OSD with a 26.2 × reduction in the 99.9 percentile runtime. We identify the beam search decoder with beam width of 32 as a promising candidate for trapped ion architectures because it achieves a 5.6 × reduction in logical error rate with a 99.9 percentile runtime per syndrome extraction round below 1 ms at p = 5 × 10 − 4 . Remarkably, this is achieved in software on a single core, without any parallelization or specialized hardware (FPGA, ASIC), suggesting one might only need three 32-core CPUs to decode a trapped ion quantum computer with 1000 logical qubits.
Quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes represent a promising approach for error correction in quantum computing. The recently proposed Tesseract decoder uses the A* search algorithm that guarantees finding the most likely error pattern. However, practical implementations of Tesseract often involve an extremely large graph, and the inherently sequential nature of the search results in high computational overhead and long runtime. To improve decoding efficiency, we propose a two-stage decoding framework. First, a belief propagation (BP) decoder efficiently processes the syndrome. This step generates hard decisions (a binary error vector) and soft information (per-qubit confidence levels). In non-convergent BP cases, a gating mechanism examines the BP decoder's output to identify and filter out qubits with oscillating confidence values. In these cases, the refined output serves as input to Tesseract, which then attempts to identify and correct any residual errors. This hybrid approach leverages the high speed of BP decoding and delegates the more challenging decoding instances to Tesseract. Numerical results demonstrate a substantial reduction in overall decoding complexity while maintaining the logical error rate (LER) of the stand-alone Tesseract. Across all tested physical error rates, the proposed method achieves at least 5x reduction in the number of expanded nodes in the Tesseract, with a peak reduction of nearly 15x at a physical error rate of p = 0.05 for the [[126, 12, d < 11]] T1 code, and approximately 8.8x at p = 0.05 for the [[72, 12, 6]] bicycle bivariate (BB) code.
In this paper, we propose a belief-propagation (BP)-based decoder, termed the Multiple-Bases Belief-Propagation List Decoder (MBBP-LD), for quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes. The key idea is to generate \emph{structured decoding diversity} by constructing multiple redundant parity-check representations via cycle-free subtree decompositions of the Tanner graph, and running BP decoding in parallel across these representations. This extends the classical Multiple-Bases Belief-Propagation (MBBP) framework to the quantum setting while preserving the linear-time complexity and efficiency of standard BP decoding, and avoids the need for super-linear post-processing. Simulation results demonstrate that MBBP-LD improves upon existing BP-based decoders, including BP with ordered statistics decoding (BP-OSD) and belief propagation with guided decimation (BPGD) across several QLDPC codes, while requiring substantially fewer total BP iterations. For bivariate bicycle codes [[144,12,12]][[144,12,12]][[144,12,12]] and [[288,12,18]][[288,12,18]][[288,12,18]], MBBP-LD achieves up to 20%20\%20% reduction in error rate compared to BPGD and up to 30%30\%30% compared to BP-OSD in the low- and moderate-error regimes. For the larger B1 code [[882,24,18≤d≤24]][[882, 24, 18 \leq d \leq 24]][[882,24,18≤d≤24]], MBBP-LD attains comparable or improved performance relative to BPGD while maintaining BP-like decoding latency under parallel implementation.
Accurate decoding of quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes often relies on expensive post-processing search, although decoding difficulty varies strongly between syndromes. We find that the benefit of deeper post-processing search is highly concentrated in a small subset of decoding instances, and that these instances can be identified directly from the decoder itself. To this end, we introduce an adaptive decoder based on belief propagation (BP) and ordered-statistics decoding (OSD), using the disagreement between the BP hard decision and the syndrome-consistent order-zero OSD solution as an internal risk signal to determine where deeper search is required. On a [[144,12,12]][[144,12,12]][[144,12,12]] bivariate bicycle code under circuit-level depolarising noise, encoding 121212 logical qubits in 144144144 data qubits with distance 121212, escalating only the highest-risk 20%20\%20% of instances recovers 85%85\%85% to 92%92\%92% of the improvement in logical error rate available from a full one-free-variable sweep, while reducing the mean serial decoding cost by a factor of 3.63.63.6 relative to applying the same truncated search to every instance. At matched budget, disagreement-guided routing also outperforms routing based on the BP syndrome residual, syndrome weight and random selection. The same behaviour reappears on a structurally distinct radial qLDPC code obtained from a lifted-product construction, where escalating 20%20\%20% of instances recovers 87%87\%87% to 94%94\%94% of the available gain. A ZZZ-memory experiment on the Quantinuum H2 trapped-ion processor, implementing both XXX-type and ZZZ-type checks, further shows that the signal remains predictive under device noise. These results show that decoder-internal disagreement can expose where additional decoding effort is valuable, allowing classical computation to be concentrated on the instances most likely to benefit from it.
The decoder is a critical component of a fault-tolerant quantum computer, computing corrections based on parity-check measurements performed throughout the computation. A soft decoder supplements its output with a confidence score which, when used alongside post-selection, can substantially improve logical performance. We introduce a soft beam search decoder for quantum low-density parity-check codes that uses internal decoder data as a confidence metric, removing the need for extra computation. We perform circuit-level simulations of five quantum LDPC codes relevant for superconducting and trapped ion architectures equipped with our global soft decoder and we obtain up to 580×580\times580× logical-error suppression at a physical error rate of 10−310^{-3}10−3 while rejecting only 0.1%0.1\%0.1% of shots. Then, we simulate an error detected measurement, which is a core logical operation of the walking cat architecture, using a streaming version of soft beam decoder and we achieve up to 210×210\times210× error suppression while increasing the rejection probability by only 0.50.50.5 percentage points. Finally, we revisit recent quantum LDPC code memory experiments on trapped ions, demonstrating that our soft decoder doubles the logical qubit lifetimes at the price of a mean rejection rate of 2.6%2.6\%2.6%--5.6%5.6\%5.6% per syndrome round, bringing all five codes into the beyond-breakeven regime.
This work presents a hardware-efficient and fully parallelizable decoder for quantum LDPC codes that leverages belief propagation (BP) with a speculative post-processing strategy inspired by classical Chase decoding algorithm. By monitoring bit-level oscillation patterns during BP, our method identifies unreliable bits and generates multiple candidate vectors to selectively flip syndromes. Each modified syndrome is then decoded independently using short-depth BP, a process we refer to as BP-SF (syndrome flip). This design eliminates the need for costly Gaussian elimination used in the current BP-OSD approaches. Our implementation achieves logical error rates comparable to or better than BP-OSD while offering significantly lower latency due to its high degree of parallelism for a variety of bivariate bicycle codes. Evaluation on the⟦144,12,12⟧\llbracket 144,12,12 \rrbracket[[144,12,12]]bivariate bicycle code shows that the proposed decoder reduces average latency to approximately 70% of BP-OSD. When post-processing is parallelized the average latency is reduced by 55% compared to the single process implementation, with the maximum latency reaching as low as 18%. These advantages make it particularly well-suited for real-time and resource-constrained quantum error correction systems.