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Frontiers in Physics

Determining quantum topological semion code decoder performance and error correction effectiveness with reinforcement learning

Haowen Wang, Qian Cao, Yun-Jia Xue, Li Jun Ding, Han-Yang Liu, Yumin Dong, Hongyang Ma

Published Aug 15, 2022• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum error correction technology is a vital method to eliminate noise during the operation of quantum computers. To solve the problem caused by noise, in this paper, reinforcement learning is used to encode defects of Semion codes, and the experience replay technique is used to realize the design of decoder. Semion codes are quantum topological error correction codes with the same symmetry group Z 2 as Kitaev toric codes, we used the topological characteristics of error correction codes to map qubits to multi-dimensional space, and error correction accuracy of the decoder is calculated to be 77.5%. Calculate the threshold of topological quantum Semion code, depending on the code distance, resulting in different thresholds, p threshold = 0.081574 when the code distance is d = 3, 5, 7 and threshold p threshold = 0.09542 when the code distance is d = 5, 7, 9. And we design the Q -network to optimize the cost of quantum circuit gates and compare the size of the cost reduction under different thresholds. Reinforcement learning is an important method for designing Semion code decoders and optimizing numerical values, providing more general error models and error correction codes for future machine engineering decoders.

DOI
10.3389/fphy.2022.981225

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Quantum error correction technology is a vital method to eliminate noise during the operation of quantum computers. To solve the problem caused by noise, in this paper, reinforcement learning is used to encode defects of Semion codes, and the experience replay technique is used to realize the design of decoder. Semion codes are quantum topological error correction codes with the same symmetry group Z 2 as Kitaev toric codes, we used the topological characteristics of error correction codes to map qubits to multi-dimensional space, and error correction accuracy of the decoder is calculated to be 77.5%. Calculate the threshold of topological quantum Semion code, depending on the code distance, resulting in different thresholds, p threshold = 0.081574 when the code distance is d = 3, 5, 7 and threshold p threshold = 0.09542 when the code distance is d = 5, 7, 9. And we design the Q -network to optimize the cost of quantum circuit gates and compare the size of the cost reduction under different thresholds. Reinforcement learning is an important method for designing Semion code decoders and optimizing numerical values, providing more general error models and error correction codes for future machine engineering decoders.
Quantum error correction (QEC) is a key technique for building scalable quantum computers that can be used to mitigate the effects of errors on physical quantum bits. Since quantum states are more or less affected by noise, errors are inevitable. Traditional QEC codes face huge challenges. Therefore, designing an error suppression algorithm based on neural networks (NN) and quantum topological error correction (QTEC) codes is particularly important for quantum teleportation. In this paper, QTEC codes: semion codes—a greater than 2 dimensional (2D) error correction code based on the double semion model—are used to suppress errors during quantum teleportation, using a NN to build a decoder based on semion codes and to simulate the quantum information error suppression process and the suppression effect. The proposed convolutional neural network (CNN) decoder is suitable for small distance topological semion codes. The aim is to optimize the NN for better decoder performance while deriving the relationship between decoder performance and slope and pseudothreshold during training and calculate the thresholds for different noise areas when the code distances are the same, P t h r e s h o l d = 0.082 for A r e a < 0.007 d B and P t h r e s h o l d = 0.096 for A r e a < 0.01 d B . This paper demonstrates the ability of CNNs to suppress errors in quantum transmission information and the great potential of NNs in the field of quantum computing.
Quantum error correction, a technique that relies on the principle of redundancy to encode logical information into additional qubits to better protect the system from noise, is necessary to design a viable quantum computer. For this new topological stabilizer code-XYZ 2 code defined on the cellular lattice, it is implemented on a hexagonal lattice of qubits and it encodes the logical qubits with the help of stabilizer measurements of weight six and weight two. However topological stabilizer codes in cellular lattice quantum systems suffer from the detrimental effects of noise due to interaction with the environment. Several decoding approaches have been proposed to address this problem. Here, we propose the use of a state-attention based reinforcement learning decoder to decode XYZ 2 codes, which enables the decoder to more accurately focus on the information related to the current decoding position, and the error correction accuracy of our reinforcement learning decoder model under the optimisation conditions can reach 83.27% under the depolarizing noise model, and we have measured thresholds of 0.18856 and 0.19043 for XYZ 2 codes at code spacing of 3–7 and 7–11, respectively. our study provides directions and ideas for applications of decoding schemes combining reinforcement learning attention mechanisms to other topological quantum error-correcting codes.
We implement a quantum error correction algorithm for bit-flip errors on the topological toric code using deep reinforcement learning. An action-value Q-function encodes the discounted value of moving a defect to a neighboring site on the square grid (the action) depending on the full set of defects on the torus (the syndrome or state). The Q-function is represented by a deep convolutional neural network. Using the translational invariance on the torus allows for viewing each defect from a central perspective which significantly simplifies the state space representation independently of the number of defect pairs. The training is done using experience replay, where data from the algorithm being played out is stored and used for mini-batch upgrade of the Q-network. We find performance which is close to, and for small error rates asymptotically equivalent to, that achieved by the Minimum Weight Perfect Matching algorithm for code distances up to d=7 . Our results show that it is possible for a self-trained agent without supervision or support algorithms to find a decoding scheme that performs on par with hand-made algorithms, opening up for future machine engineered decoders for more general error models and error correcting codes.
Decoding is an essential component of quantum error correction (QEC), translating stabilizer measurement outcomes into corrective actions that suppress logical errors and preserve logical quantum information. Building fault-tolerant architectures requires increasing the code distance, which in turn places growing demands on decoding accuracy, scalability, and practical deployability. While a wide range of decoding algorithms have been proposed and demonstrated, achieving reliable, scalable, and real-time decoding remains a significant challenge. Machine-learning (ML) approaches are particularly well suited to this setting, as quantum error decoding is fundamentally a problem of processing large volumes of classical data with complex spatiotemporal correlations. This chapter surveys ML-based methods for quantum error decoding, with a focus on topological codes and an emphasis on architectural principles, practical performance, and real-time considerations. We first frame decoding as a learning problem and outline key paradigms, including discriminative, generative, and reinforcement-learning formulations. We then introduce the neural network building blocks that underpin most contemporary neural decoders and discuss how these components can be integrated to balance expressivity, scalability, and latency. Building on this architectural perspective, we review recent progress and benchmarks in neural decoding for memory experiments, and discuss real-time decoding, open challenges, and future directions toward scalable fault-tolerant quantum computing.
Quantum error correction technology is an important method to eliminate errors during the operation of quantum computers. In order to solve the problem of influence of errors on physical qubits, we propose an approximate error correction scheme that performs dimension mapping operations on surface codes. This error correction scheme utilizes the topological properties of error correction codes to map the surface code dimension to three dimensions. Compared to previous error correction schemes, the present three-dimensional surface code exhibits good scalability due to its higher redundancy and more efficient error correction capabilities. By reducing the number of ancilla qubits required for error correction, this approach achieves savings in measurement space and reduces resource consumption costs. In order to improve the decoding efficiency and solve the problem of the correlation between the surface code stabilizer and the 3D space after dimension mapping, we employ a reinforcement learning (RL) decoder based on deep Q-learning, which enables faster identification of the optimal syndrome and achieves better thresholds through conditional optimization. Compared to the minimum weight perfect matching decoding, the threshold of the RL trained model reaches 0.78%, which is 56% higher and enables large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computation.
Quantum computers have the possibility of a much reduced calculation load compared with classical computers in specific problems. Quantum error correction (QEC) is vital for handling qubits, which are vulnerable to external noise. In QEC, actual errors are predicted from the results of syndrome measurements by stabilizer generators, in place of making direct measurements of the data qubits. Here, we propose Quantum Golay code Error Correction (QGEC), a QEC method using Golay code, which is an efficient coding method in classical information theory. We investigated our method's ability in decoding calculations with the Transformer. We evaluated the accuracy of the decoder in a code space defined by the generative polynomials with three different weights sets and three noise models with different correlations of bit-flip error and phase-flip error. Furthermore, under a noise model following a discrete uniform distribution, we compared the decoding performance of Transformer decoders with identical architectures trained respectively on Golay and toric codes. The results showed that the noise model with the smaller correlation gave better accuracy, while the weights of the generative polynomials had little effect on the accuracy of the decoder. In addition, they showed that Golay code requiring 23 data qubits and having a code distance of 7 achieved higher decoding accuracy than toric code which requiring 50 data qubits and having a code distance of 5. This suggests that implementing quantum error correction using a Transformer may enable the Golay code to realize fault-tolerant quantum computation more efficiently.