Efficient Approximate Degenerate Ordered Statistics Decoding for Quantum Codes via Reliable Subset Reduction

Abstract: Efficient decoding of quantum codes is crucial for achieving high-performance quantum error correction. In this paper, we introduce the concept of approximate degenerate decoding and integrate it with ordered statistics decoding (OSD). Previously, we proposed a reliability metric that leverages both hard and soft decisions from the output of belief propagation (BP), which is particularly useful for identifying highly reliable subsets of variables. Using the approach of reliable subset reduction, we reduce the effective problem size. Additionally, we identify a degeneracy condition that allows high-order OSD to be simplified to order-0 OSD. By integrating these techniques, we present an ADOSD algorithm that significantly improves OSD efficiency in the code capacity noise model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our BP+ADOSD approach through extensive simulations on a varity of quantum codes, including generalized hypergraph-product codes, topological codes, lift-connected surface codes, and bivariate bicycle codes. The results indicate that the BP+ADOSD decoder outperforms existing methods, achieving higher error thresholds and enhanced performance at low error rates. Additionally, we validate the efficiency of our approach in terms of computational time, demonstrating that ADOSD requires, on average, the same amount of time as two to three BP iterations on surface codes at a depolarizing error rate of around $1\%$. All the proposed algorithms are compared using single-threaded CPU implementations.