Degeneracy Cutting: A Local and Efficient Post-Processing for Belief Propagation Decoding of Quantum Low-Density Parity-Check Codes

Abstract: Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes are promising for realizing scalable fault-tolerant quantum computation due to their potential for low-overhead protocols. A common approach to decoding qLDPC codes is to use the belief propagation (BP) decoder, followed by a post-processing step to enhance decoding accuracy. For real-time decoding, the post-processing algorithm is desirable to have a small computational cost and rely only on local operations on the Tanner graph to facilitate parallel implementation. To address this requirement, we propose degeneracy cutting (DC), an efficient post-processing technique for the BP decoder that operates on information restricted to the support of each stabilizer generator. DC selectively removes one variable node with the lowest error probability for each stabilizer generator, significantly improving decoding performance while retaining the favorable computational scaling and structure amenable to parallelization inherent to BP. We further extend our method to realistic noise models, including phenomenological and circuit-level noise models, by introducing the detector degeneracy matrix, which generalizes the notion of stabilizer-induced degeneracy to these settings. Numerical simulations demonstrate that BP+DC achieves decoding performance approaching that of BP followed by ordered statistics decoding (BP+OSD) in several settings, while requiring significantly less computational cost. Our results present BP+DC as a promising decoder for fault-tolerant quantum computing, offering a valuable balance of accuracy, efficiency, and suitability for parallel implementation.