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SAGE-QEC: Structure-Aware Gated Error Correction for Surface-Code Memories Under Structured Noise

Asia Alhammadi, Mohammed Al-Absi

Published Sep 9, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract Quantum error-correction decoders must convert noisy syndrome records into logical decisions while operating under strict latency and reliability constraints. Minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM) remains a strong baseline for surface-code decoding because it is fast, interpretable, and exact for its graphlike optimization problem [1–8]. However, the graphlike independent-error approximation can become mismatched when syndrome records contain temporal drift, measurement corruption, crosstalk, bursts, or mixtures of mechanisms [9–18]. We introduce SAGE-QEC, a failure-aware selective decoder that retains nominal PyMatching as its default decision and learns when an observable syndrome structure warrants an alternative candidate. SAGE-QEC uses train-frozen structure thresholds, a candidate ranker, validation-only policy selection, and a paired blind evaluation. Across 45 simulator conditions, SAGE-QEC reduced the aggregate logical error rate from 27.1285% for PyMatching to 24.8320%, corresponding to an 8.47% relative reduction. The campaign used rotated surface-code memory circuits at distances 3, 5, and 7, nominal circuit parameters 0.002, 0.003, and 0.005, five seeds, and four test regimes withheld from training: Burst-3, Temporal Drift, Crosstalk, and Mixed Noise. The test set contained 81,000 paired shots. All twelve distance-by-regime aggregate comparisons favored SAGE-QEC in the executed campaign, with paired bootstrap intervals below zero for SAGE-QEC minus PyMatching. The result is evidence of a reproducible simulator-level improvement, not a claim of universal decoder superiority. SAGE-QEC currently uses logical-output proxy candidates rather than a complete physical correction search, and its intervention rate remains high under distribution shift. It has not yet been compared with a fully calibrated correlated-noise space-time PyMatching baseline or hardware calibration data. We therefore characterize SAGE-QEC as a strong qualification-stage prototype and release a complete audit protocol for the next industrial validation stage.

DOI
10.21203/rs.3.rs-10955379/v1

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Abstract Quantum error-correction decoders must convert noisy syndrome records into logical decisions while operating under strict latency and reliability constraints. Minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM) remains a strong baseline for surface-code decoding because it is fast, interpretable, and exact for its graphlike optimization problem [1–8]. However, the graphlike independent-error approximation can become mismatched when syndrome records contain temporal drift, measurement corruption, crosstalk, bursts, or mixtures of mechanisms [9–18]. We introduce SAGE-QEC, a failure-aware selective decoder that retains nominal PyMatching as its default decision and learns when an observable syndrome structure warrants an alternative candidate. SAGE-QEC uses train-frozen structure thresholds, a candidate ranker, validation-only policy selection, and a paired blind evaluation. Across 45 simulator conditions, SAGE-QEC reduced the aggregate logical error rate from 27.1285% for PyMatching to 24.8320%, corresponding to an 8.47% relative reduction. The campaign used rotated surface-code memory circuits at distances 3, 5, and 7, nominal circuit parameters 0.002, 0.003, and 0.005, five seeds, and four test regimes withheld from training: Burst-3, Temporal Drift, Crosstalk, and Mixed Noise. The test set contained 81,000 paired shots. All twelve distance-by-regime aggregate comparisons favored SAGE-QEC in the executed campaign, with paired bootstrap intervals below zero for SAGE-QEC minus PyMatching. The result is evidence of a reproducible simulator-level improvement, not a claim of universal decoder superiority. SAGE-QEC currently uses logical-output proxy candidates rather than a complete physical correction search, and its intervention rate remains high under distribution shift. It has not yet been compared with a fully calibrated correlated-noise space-time PyMatching baseline or hardware calibration data. We therefore characterize SAGE-QEC as a strong qualification-stage prototype and release a complete audit protocol for the next industrial validation stage.
Real-time decoding is a major bottleneck in scaling quantum error correction (QEC) from noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices to fault-tolerant quantum computing. We present an adaptive confidence-gated decoding framework for the rotated surface code that treats decoding as a two-stage inference problem. A lightweight feed-forward neural network performs fast-path decoding for the majority of syndrome measurements, while only low-confidence predictions are escalated to a minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM) refinement stage. We benchmark the framework on rotated surface codes with distances d∈{3,5,7,9,11}d \in \{3,5,7,9,11\}d∈{3,5,7,9,11} under circuit-level depolarising noise using the Stim stabiliser simulator. The evaluation characterises logical accuracy, confidence-controlled accuracy-latency trade-offs, decoding throughput, per-shot latency, and decoding-graph resource scaling. Routing only 3.3%-6.2% of syndromes to the refinement stage improves logical accuracy from 99.21% for the neural-only baseline to 99.81% at a confidence threshold of 0.95 while incurring only a bounded increase in average decoding cost. Neural-decoder throughput saturates near 4.6×1054.6 \times 10^{5}4.6×105 samples s−1^{-1}−1 at batch size 512 on commodity CPU hardware, indicating that the neural fast path is not the dominant throughput bottleneck beyond code distance d=7d=7d=7. We release the complete benchmarking pipeline, trained models, raw benchmark data, and source code, and explicitly distinguish the experimentally validated contributions from the broader hardware-aware QEC co-design roadmap, including hardware-constrained code discovery, GPU-accelerated inference, and multi-noise optimisation, which remain directions for future work.
Noise-induced errors in quantum information processing corrupt computation and cause useful algorithms to fail. Quantum ErrorCorrection (QEC) counteracts this by encoding a single logical qubit across many physical qubits and correcting errors through repeatedsyndrome measurements. The Minimum-Weight Perfect Matching (MWPM) decoder is the accuracy benchmark for surface-codedecoding, but its microsecond-scale latency can consume the entire QEC cycle time of superconducting processors, leaving almost nomargin for other control operations. Pre-decoded lookup tables reduce latency to the nanosecond scale, but their memory requirementsgrow exponentially with code size, limiting them to very small code distances. In this work, we demonstrate a single-level cache,implemented as a software prototype, that accelerates decoding by exploiting the repetitive nature of surface-code syndromes. Hitrates above 80% are achieved for code distances up to 9 at below-threshold noise rates, and effective decoding speedups of up to18.1 times over PyMatching’s standalone decoding time are observed at code distance ≥ 5. Cache lookup latency remains below 400nanoseconds in the worst case, with memory well below that of full lookup tables. We further develop a mathematical frameworkdefining the theoretical limits of any cache-based decoder.
Quantum computers can solve selected problems more efficiently than classical computers, but current devices are limited by high physical error rates. Quantum Error Correction (QEC) mitigates this by encoding many physical qubits into a logical qubit, with the surface code among the most widely studied approaches. Since syndrome measurements are produced continuously, the decoder must process them fast enough to avoid becoming a system bottleneck, making real-time decoding essential for fault-tolerant quantum computing. While most state-of-the-art real-time decoders rely on Minimum-Weight Perfect Matching (MWPM), we instead use a high-accuracy Graph Neural Network (GNN) that trades higher computational cost for lower logical error rates. To make this GNN practical for real-time decoding, we apply algorithm-hardware co-design. We reduce complexity through hardware-guided pruning and retraining, producing two hardware-friendly models that reduce parameter count by 3.1×3.1\times3.1× and 6.5×6.5\times6.5×. These target, respectively, an average decoding latency of one syndrome cycle and a worst-case latency within one syndrome cycle. We further reduce hardware cost using input-graph filtering and post-training quantization. Based on these optimized models, we propose an FPGA-based architecture for low-latency inference and real-time decoding. Evaluated on surface codes up to distance 7 under circuit-level noise at physical error rate p=10−3p=10^{-3}p=10−3, our decoder outperforms MWPM in decoding accuracy for both average-latency and max-latency settings. It reduces logical error rate by 40% at 1μs1μs1μs average latency, and by 13% under a strict 1μs1μs1μs deadline.
Abstract We study decoder-representation sensitivity in simulated rotated surface-code Z-memory circuits with local spatially correlated XX pair events. At distance 3, ordinary minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM) produced 4,610 versus 1,260 logical failures at p_corr = 10^-4 and 5,437 versus 2,239 at p_corr = 2 × 10^-4 on the same 500,000-shot samples using original-order versus canonical-sorted detector error models (DEMs). Across 50 additional seeded permutations per condition, failure counts varied widely. Canonical sorting tied for the minimum in this finite tested set; it is not claimed to be universally optimal. The ordering experiment reorders complete error instructions in a flattened DEM, preserving their probabilities and absolute detector and logical targets. PyMatching documents retaining the first-added logical-label set when parallel graph edges are merged; we therefore interpret the findings as a workflow-specific reproducibility result, not a newly discovered general software defect. At distances 5 and 7, correlation-aware MWPM had lower observed failure rates in all eight tested conditions, with six paired contrasts remaining significant after Bonferroni correction. An exact maximum-a-posteriori calculation gave a 0.2367% Bayes risk for the flattened-DEM distribution at p_corr = 10^-4; this is optimal for that modeled distribution only. This bounded classical simulation study proposes no new decoder, estimates no threshold, and provides no hardware evidence. Some historical source-to-result provenance remains incomplete, as disclosed in the manuscript. Code and evidence: https://github.com/tgiwn/QEC-surface-code-correlated-noise/tree/106d32e815c5f6009941afc36d3f65be7ecf35a3 Status: This is a preprint and has not undergone peer review.
Quantum error-correcting decoders provide both corrections and confidence estimates for the logical-error risk of individual measurement records. Such confidence can guide postselection, but it depends on the accuracy of the decoder noise model. When the physical device drifts away from that model, confidence measures such as the logical gap can become miscalibrated. We show that this mismatch can itself provide useful information. On IBM quantum hardware, syndrome statistics drift across consecutive acquisition windows, and the resulting detector histories differ substantially from those predicted by the stationary detector error model used for decoding. We observe a similar hardware-model mismatch in independent Google surface-code memory data. We exploit this effect by assigning additional rejection weight to detector histories that are unlikely under the assumed model. For minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM), the minimum weight WWW provides an inexpensive proxy for syndrome surprisal. On held-out IBM repetition-code memories, likelihood-aware postselection reduces the retained logical-error probability (LEP) by 10.6%10.6\%10.6% at d=7d=7d=7 and 28.8%28.8\%28.8% at d=9d=9d=9, both at 15%15\%15% rejection. On Google ten-round d=5d=5d=5 XZZX surface-code memory data, it reduces retained LEP by 75.4%75.4\%75.4% at 90%90\%90% rejection. Applied to Google's magic-state cultivation experiment with the Tesseract decoder, it reduces tomography infidelity by 34.7%34.7\%34.7% with 30%30\%30% additional grafting-stage rejection, or increases accepted yield by 30.4%30.4\%30.4% at a target fidelity of 97.0%97.0\%97.0%. Burst-noise simulations show that the advantage persists as code distance and syndrome-extraction volume increase. The method reuses quantities already produced during logical-gap decoding and requires only an additional fitting step.
Fault-tolerant quantum computation critically depends on the ability to detect and correct physical qubit errors faster than they accumulate. The surface code (SC) has emerged as the most experimentally promising quantum error correction (QEC) framework due to its high threshold and local stabilizer structure, yet its practical performance is bottlenecked by decoder efficiency. Traditional decoding approaches such as minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM) achieve near-optimal accuracy under independent noise but struggle with correlated errors, circuit-level noise, and real-time latency constraints. This paper investigates how neural network (NN)-based decoders reduce logical error rates in SC quantum systems by learning complex syndrome-to-correction mappings from data. We propose a hybrid convolutional-recurrent neural architecture that processes stabilizer measurement syndromes across both spatial and temporal dimensions, enabling the decoder to capture correlated error patterns inherent in realistic hardware. Systematic simulations under depolarizing, biased, and circuit-level noise models demonstrate that the proposed neural decoder achieves a logical error rate reduction of up to 41.3% compared to MWPM at a physical error rate of p = 0.008, while maintaining sub-millisecond decoding latency compatible with superconducting qubit cycle times. These results establish that data-driven neural decoders represent a scalable and hardware-compatible pathway toward achieving the logical error rates required for practical fault-tolerant quantum computing.