Gauge theories are important descriptions for many physical phenomena and systems in quantum computation. Automorphism of gauge group naturally gives global symmetries of gauge theories. In this work we study such symmetries in gauge theories induced by automorphisms of the gauge group, when the gauge theories have nontrivial topological actions in different spacetime dimensions. We discover the automorphism symmetry can be extended, become a higher group symmetry, and/or become a non-invertible symmetry. We illustrate the discussion with various models in field theory and on the lattice. In particular, we use automorphism symmetry to construct new transversal non-Clifford logical gates in topological quantum codes. In particular, we show that 2+1d
ZN qudit Clifford stabilizer models can implement non-Clifford transversal logical gate in the 4th level
ZN qudit Clifford hierarchy for
N≥3, extending the generalized Bravyi-König bound proposed in the companion paper [arXiv:2511.02900] for qubits.
The recently introduced tile codes are a promising alternative to surface codes, combining two-dimensional locality with higher encoding efficiency. While surface codes are well understood in terms of their logical operators and boundary behavior, much less is known about tile codes. In this work, we establish a natural and precise description of their logical operator space. We prove that, under mild assumptions, any tile code admits a canonical symplectic basis of logical operators supported along lattice boundaries, which can be generated efficiently by a simple cellular automaton with the number of update rules only depending on the non-locality of the tile code. Further, we develop algebraic and algebro-geometric frameworks for tile codes, by resolving them by translationally invariant Pauli stabilizer models and showing that they arise as derived sections of a Koszul complex on
P1×P1. Finally, we introduce the concept of derived automorphisms for quantum codes. These are automorphism-like operations that can exist even for codes that do not have symmetries. We explain how derived automorphisms can be implemented for tile codes in a low-overhead and fault-tolerant manner by extending the lattice on one side and shrinking it on the other. While this operation is trivial for the surface code, it induces a product of logical CNOT gates on the encoded information. Our results provide new structural insights into tile codes and lay the groundwork for tile codes as building blocks for fault-tolerant quantum computation.