This record contains a manuscript and supporting reproducibility materials for “Ledger-Valid Recovery Diagnostics for Quantum Computing: A Prespecified Sequential Audit for Claim-Limited Recovery Validation.” The paper proposes a methodological validation framework for quantum-computing recovery claims. Its central claim is that endpoint recovery success is necessary but not sufficient for a strong recovery claim when calibration failure, false-carrier acceptance, postselection artifacts, leakage, sentinel blindness, or hidden discard can carry failure modes out of view. The manuscript introduces a prespecified S0–S4 ledger audit that converts familiar diagnostic ingredients—label calibration, candidate recovery, false-carrier challenge tests, postselection/leakage accounting, and sentinel observability—into an ordered, claim-limiting taxonomy. A supportive recovery claim is permitted only when all required gates pass; otherwise, the first failed stage determines a lower claim ceiling and an interpretable failure class. The evaluation is based on synthetic endpoint-level validation suites rather than circuit-level simulation or hardware data. These suites test the behavior of the decision architecture under clean support, degraded observability, false-carrier artifacts, postselection/leakage artifacts, sentinel-blind cases, correlated artifacts, and adversarial overlap. The results show a strong specificity/sensitivity tradeoff: the full ledger protocol sharply reduces synthetic non-support supportive-call rates relative to endpoint-only reporting, but with substantial loss of mechanism-positive support sensitivity. The paper explicitly treats this as a conservative claim-validity architecture, not as a new quantum error-correcting code, new physical observable, hardware speedup, or proof of improved device performance. The supporting materials document the final synthetic validation protocol, endpoint definitions, decision-bound implementation, direction-aware threshold sensitivity analysis, latent-threshold eligibility analysis, mechanism-negative/latent-eligible boundary cases, and figure/table traceability. The archive is intended to support review of the manuscript’s aggregate numerical claims and methodological provenance. Hardware implementation, independent simulator validation, and full raw-event-ledger reproduction are identified as future extensions. Suggested keywords: quantum computing; quantum error correction; validation methodology; recovery diagnostics; leakage; postselection; benchmarking; synthetic validation; decision architecture; reproducibility.
This record contains a manuscript and supporting reproducibility materials for “Ledger-Valid Recovery Diagnostics for Quantum Computing: A Prespecified Sequential Audit for Claim-Limited Recovery Validation.” The paper proposes a methodological validation framework for quantum-computing recovery claims. Its central claim is that endpoint recovery success is necessary but not sufficient for a strong recovery claim when calibration failure, false-carrier acceptance, postselection artifacts, leakage, sentinel blindness, or hidden discard can carry failure modes out of view. The manuscript introduces a prespecified S0–S4 ledger audit that converts familiar diagnostic ingredients—label calibration, candidate recovery, false-carrier challenge tests, postselection/leakage accounting, and sentinel observability—into an ordered, claim-limiting taxonomy. A supportive recovery claim is permitted only when all required gates pass; otherwise, the first failed stage determines a lower claim ceiling and an interpretable failure class. The evaluation is based on synthetic endpoint-level validation suites rather than circuit-level simulation or hardware data. These suites test the behavior of the decision architecture under clean support, degraded observability, false-carrier artifacts, postselection/leakage artifacts, sentinel-blind cases, correlated artifacts, and adversarial overlap. The results show a strong specificity/sensitivity tradeoff: the full ledger protocol sharply reduces synthetic non-support supportive-call rates relative to endpoint-only reporting, but with substantial loss of mechanism-positive support sensitivity. The paper explicitly treats this as a conservative claim-validity architecture, not as a new quantum error-correcting code, new physical observable, hardware speedup, or proof of improved device performance. The supporting materials document the final synthetic validation protocol, endpoint definitions, decision-bound implementation, direction-aware threshold sensitivity analysis, latent-threshold eligibility analysis, mechanism-negative/latent-eligible boundary cases, and figure/table traceability. The archive is intended to support review of the manuscript’s aggregate numerical claims and methodological provenance. Hardware implementation, independent simulator validation, and full raw-event-ledger reproduction are identified as future extensions. Suggested keywords: quantum computing; quantum error correction; validation methodology; recovery diagnostics; leakage; postselection; benchmarking; synthetic validation; decision architecture; reproducibility.
This manuscript presents a methods-forward, operational protocol for evaluating whether any structured dependence remains in quantum-computing measurement records after explicit modeling of standard quantum and device-level mechanisms. Classical definiteness is defined at the record layer, and pre-record states are treated as predictive descriptions rather than as classical outcome facts. Within this operational stance, the protocol converts questions about outcome status and record formation into a falsifiable test program grounded in preregistered analysis rules and standard measurement telemetry. A locked null-model family is specified in advance, incorporating standard quantum dynamics together with documented device-level mechanisms including drift, correlated and non-Markovian noise, crosstalk proxies, and leakage indicators. The framework provides operational definitions, a conservative postulate set, preregistered endpoints, residual-adjudication criteria, negative controls, a fixed windowing discipline, and a bound-first reporting standard designed to yield informative constraints under null results. Any candidate contribution beyond the declared null family must appear as structured, reproducible residual dependence that survives the locked null family and the full residual-filter sequence. Version 4.4 refines the protocol specification, clarifies evidentiary boundaries, and strengthens the integration of the synthetic demonstration. The manuscript includes a fully specified classical simulation that executes the decision pipeline under controlled conditions. The synthetic study illustrates how the protocol classifies a bounded-null case, a measured-artifact case, a partial-artifact/unresolved-covariate case, an injected structured-residual case, and a failed-topology case. This demonstration establishes computational executability of the protocol and clarifies the behavior of the decision tree, but it does not constitute empirical evidence for any physical mechanism. Because the protocol relies only on standard measurement telemetry and preregistered analysis rules, it is directly implementable across contemporary quantum-computing platforms and does not depend on any single dataset, backend, or hardware realization. The manuscript is a specification paper: it defines a reproducible evidentiary framework for record-level claims, while large-scale empirical implementation, hardware benchmarking, and cross-platform replication remain subsequent studies.
Empirical scaling laws for the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on near-term hardware are often motivated by noise-compounding arguments or circuit-structure heuristics. Such models are rarely evaluated under pre-specified failure criteria that prevent post-hoc rescue. This study reports an audit-disciplined attempt to construct and test a predictive scaling law for QAOA-based minimal cut set recovery in fault tree models. The workflow used hash-locked artifacts, pre-specified kill switches, one-time holdout evaluation, and explicit no-rerun and no-rescue rules at every phase boundary. The initial F²-grounded compounding specification failed its pre-specified identifiability gate (KS3). Under an anti-leakage filter applied to 108 candidate rescue terms, zero candidates recovered a passing α₁ slope while also adding explanatory power above the structural baseline. A pre-specified structure-dominated fallback model was then defined and fit. The fallback reproduced its locked training prediction pathway to machine precision, with maximum absolute prediction difference of 3.55 × 10⁻¹⁵. It then failed the locked 24-row transport holdout. Holdout RMSE was 5.2214 against a locked threshold of 0.3770, and all 24 residuals were positive, giving a two-sided sign-test p-value of 1.19 × 10⁻⁷. The mean log residual of 5.198 corresponds to approximately 180-fold underprediction on the linear scale. Post-failure diagnostics indicated lower-n domain shift with standardized mean difference of −2.27 and four holdout rows with G_2q below the training range. By design, these diagnostics were explanatory only and did not authorize rescue, refit, reweighting, row removal, or threshold revision. The results do not support a deployable scaling law on the present corpus. Instead, they demonstrate that pre-specified audit controls can convert an attempted positive scaling-law claim into a reproducible falsification result with clear claim boundaries. The audit framework, the locked failure chain, and the allowed-and-forbidden claim boundary together constitute the paper's contribution. The work is offered as a methodological reference for future QAOA-on-hardware scaling studies.
This paper reframes logical-qubit benchmarking from a scalar error-suppression problem into a branch-resolved logical-state maintenance problem. Conventional quantum error-correction reporting focuses on logical error rates, better-than-physical comparisons, code-distance scaling, decoder performance, and accepted-stream outcomes. These metrics are essential, but they do not by themselves reveal which stabilization mechanism produced the improvement, whether the result depends on active correction or detection-assisted filtering, how much acceptance overhead was paid, or which branches remain underdetermined because raw timing, reset, syndrome, leakage, or feed-forward records are unavailable. The central contribution is QHOME-RETROFIT, a branch-resolved diagnostic framework that operationalizes the Quantum-State Homeostasis condition of Paper 22 on published quantum error-correction records. The framework converts logical-state maintenance into normalized engineering margins, evidence-status labels, tiered verdicts, limiting-branch reports, and a reproducible CSV-first evaluation workflow. It separates restoration capacity, logical-basis sharpness, protected-mode occupation, source-sink coupling, logical gain, acceptance overhead, and repeated-round stability instead of collapsing them into a single logical-error-rate claim. QHOME-RETROFIT is not a new quantum processor, error-correcting code, decoder, or threshold theorem. It does not claim raw shot-level access where such records are not publicly available, and it does not treat detection-assisted post-selection as equivalent to full real-time source-sink closure. The core operating rule is: score only the branch supported by the released evidence, label what is weakly proxied, and leave underdetermined what the public record cannot decide. The manuscript is a systems-code and reproducibility-layer paper, not a hardware demonstration. It defines a diagnostic grammar, evidence classes, tier gates, reproducibility plans, raw-record replay boundaries, and package-level audit artifacts. Its companion package provides fixed CSV inputs, generated outputs, dashboards, tests, and manifest checks so that the branch verdicts can be inspected rather than accepted as prose claims. Before scaling claims about fault-tolerant quantum computing, this paper argues, researchers should test logical-state maintenance: whether a reported improvement is correction-driven, detection-assisted, acceptance-limited, repeated-round stable, source-sink supported, and sufficiently evidenced to justify the engineering claim being made. Keywords: QHOME-RETROFIT, quantum error correction, logical qubits, fault-tolerant quantum computing, logical-state maintenance, branch-resolved diagnostics, source-sink architecture, post-selection, accepted-stream filtering, reproducibility, systems code, evidence-status labels, tiered verdicts, logical error suppression.
This preregistration describes a confirmatory study of an upstream conditioning architecture in a quantum error-correction workflow. The project’s purpose is to test whether an intervention applied prior to the primary decoder produces a real and reproducible decoder-relevant effect, remains compatible with more than one downstream decoder family, generates a measurable exposed-observable statistical footprint, and improves or preserves performance across a preregistered regime rather than only at a single operating point. The study is intentionally limited to architecture-level evaluation, with the public claim set confined to exposed observables, frozen transformations, preregistered statistical tests, explicit negative controls, and bounded interpretation rules. The confirmatory design is organized around five preregistered tests: category existence, decoder compatibility, structural footprint, observable statistical signature, and regime robustness. Across these tests, the central comparison is between a baseline control pipeline and a conditioned pipeline in which the upstream intervention is applied while all non-conditioning settings are held fixed. The study uses frozen observables and frozen execution rules, including matched seeds, shot counts, code distances, physical error rates, geometry, and baseline decoder settings, so that any supported effect can be interpreted as evidence about the architecture under test rather than as a byproduct of post hoc tuning. To preserve a clean-room boundary, the registration restricts primary analysis to exposed, decoder-facing quantities only. These include logical failure, an exposed defect-count summary, and an exposed decoder-difficulty proxy, along with a locked scalar error-load construction derived from control-only standardization. The study does not rely on decoder-internal state variables, hidden confidence traces, or implementation-specific internal diagnostics in its primary confirmatory analyses. This structure is intended to let readers evaluate whether the architecture leaves a reproducible footprint in decoder-facing behavior without disclosing reconstruction-level mechanism details. Expected outcomes are defined in confirmatory rather than speculative terms. If the preregistered hypotheses are supported, the study is expected to provide evidence that an upstream conditioning intervention exists as a real architectural category in QEC, acts before the primary decoder, is compatible with downstream decoding, changes decoder-relevant exposed structure, and produces a reproducible observable statistical footprint in logical-failure behavior. If support is absent, mixed, or null, those outcomes will still be recorded under the frozen rules without rescue through post hoc metric changes, reweighting, or reinterpretation. In either case, the expected result of the registration is a bounded, auditable public record of whether this architecture class shows reproducible category-level behavior under a preregistered confirmatory design. The preregistration is not intended to establish a unique mechanism identity, identify a privileged implementation, disclose implementation-specific reconstruction details, or support claims about exact targeting logic, suppression laws, subset-sizing logic, telemetry-governed control, or broader cross-domain theory narratives. Public-facing interpretation is therefore intentionally limited to category validation and exposed-observable behavior. This is meant to support rigorous public evaluation while preserving strict clean-room limits around protected implementation detail.
This paper develops an engineering-facing diagnostic bridge between the recoverability-based theory of structural irreversibility and practical evaluation in quantum error correction and monitored quantum platforms. The central problem addressed in this work is that structural recoverability, threshold-like margins, false-collapse, and Recoverability Index–type diagnostics provide useful theoretical distinctions, but they do not by themselves specify how experimentalists or engineers should organize platform-level data, compare regimes, or report recoverability-relevant behavior. The paper therefore introduces a proxy map from structural quantities to engineering diagnostics. Generalized recoverability is associated with recovery performance, decoder-assisted restoration, logical-state fidelity, and related reconstruction-sensitive quantities. Threshold-like margins are associated with entropy-like, noise-sensitive, or transition-localizing proxies. False-collapse is associated with mismatch windows in which collapse-like or transition-like indicators become strong while recovery-sensitive records still indicate residual recoverability. The paper also proposes a minimal diagnostic architecture for QEC and monitored platforms. This architecture consists of four layers: an appearance-sensitive proxy, a recoverability-sensitive proxy, a threshold-like locator, and a window-based reporting layer. Together, these layers support regime classification, early-warning detection, false-collapse-like mismatch identification, finite-window reporting, and cross-regime comparison. A QEC-oriented realization is presented to show how syndrome histories, logical-failure markers, logical recovery performance, entropy-like proxies, false-collapse window frequencies, and RI-like summaries can be organized into a coherent diagnostic workflow. The goal is not to replace detailed decoder analysis or hardware-specific benchmarking, but to provide a bridge-level language for deciding what should be logged, estimated, compared, and reported when studying the approach to effective irreversibility in error-managed quantum systems. This work should be read as an engineering and experimental companion to the broader recoverability program. Its contribution is to make structural irreversibility operationally legible by mapping theoretical quantities to measurable, computable, and reportable diagnostics in contemporary quantum platforms.
Quantum-control optimisation typically begins with calibration records assumed to remain applicable to the intended operation. Yet coherence, phase references, coupling, read-out response and subsystem interactions vary with time and operating context. Local calibration success may therefore be insuffi- cient to justify joint or changed-context control, allowing optimisation to pursue candidates founded on stale, incomplete or inapplicable evidence. We propose an evidence-governed admissibility framework that checks evidence role, scope, freshness, provenance and composition authority before constructing control candidates. Its computational layers have distinct functions: Layer 1 classifies routes as Permit, Withhold or Revalidate, retaining auditable native states and reasons; Layer 2A constructs and screens reduced-model candidates only for permitted routes; and Layer 2B checks applicable end-to-end workflows. Synthetic integration and authority-ablation tests demonstrate enforceable differences in permission, and the implementation passed 150/150 core and 10/10 slew-specific tests. These are computational findings, not hardware validation. We also provide two complementary prospective experimental arms for evaluating practical benefit. Arm 1 (predictive lift) freezes assessments before hardware outcomes are known and tests whether they predict the performance of independently authorised ordinary-baseline operations better than calibration- or availability-only benchmarks. Arm 2 (constructive recovery) tests whether initially unsuitable cases can yield authorised alternative controls after evidence refresh or reconfirmation, a new Layer 1 decision and downstream construction, while preserving the original classification. We release code, schemas, guided workbooks, fixtures and prespecified protocols for independent pilots. Hardware validation could establish whether this approach reduces wasted searches and improves control reliability or qubit performance.