Artificial Intelligence for Quantum Error Correction: A Comprehensive Review

Abstract: Quantum Error Correction (QEC) is the process of detecting and correcting errors in quantum systems, which are prone to decoherence and quantum noise. QEC is crucial for developing stable and highly accurate quantum computing systems, therefore, several research efforts have been made to develop the best QEC strategy. Recently, Google's breakthrough shows great potential to improve the accuracy of the existing error correction methods. This survey provides a comprehensive review of advancements in the use of AI tools to enhance QEC schemes for existing Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) systems. Specifically, we focus on ML strategies and span from unsupervised, supervised, semi-supervised, to reinforcement learning methods. It is clear from the evidence, that these methods have recently shown superior efficiency and accuracy in the QEC pipeline compared to conventional approaches. Our review covers more than 150 relevant studies, offering a comprehensive overview of progress and perspective in this field. We organized the reviewed literature on the basis of the AI strategies employed and improvements in error correction performance. We also discuss challenges ahead such as data sparsity caused by limited quantum error datasets and scalability issues as the number of quantum bits (qubits) in quantum systems kept increasing very fast. We conclude the paper with summary of existing works and future research directions aimed at deeper integration of AI techniques into QEC strategies.