Adaptive Aborting Schemes for Quantum Error Correction Decoding
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Quantum Physics arXiv:2602.16929 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 18 Feb 2026] Title:Adaptive Aborting Schemes for Quantum Error Correction Decoding Authors:Sanidhay Bhambay, Prakash Murali, Neil Walton, Thirupathaiah Vasantam View a PDF of the paper titled Adaptive Aborting Schemes for Quantum Error Correction Decoding, by Sanidhay Bhambay and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Quantum error correction (QEC) is essential for realizing fault-tolerant quantum computation. Current QEC controllers execute all scheduled syndrome (parity-bit) measurement rounds before decoding, even when early syndrome data indicates that the run will result in an error. The resulting excess measurements increase the decoder's workload and system latency. To address this, we introduce an adaptive abort module that simultaneously reduces decoder overhead and suppresses logical error rates in surface codes and color codes under an existing QEC controller. The key idea is that initial syndrome information allows the controller to terminate risky shots early before additional resources are spent. An effective scheme balances the cost of further measurement against the restart cost and thus increases decoder efficiency. Adaptive abort schemes dynamically adjust the number of syndrome measurement rounds per shot using real-time syndrome information. We consider three schemes: fixed-depth (FD) decoding (the standard non-adaptive approach used in current state-of-the-art QEC controllers), and two adaptive schemes, AdAbort and One-Step Lookahead (OSLA) decoding. For surface and color codes under a realistic circuit-level depolarizing noise model, AdAbort substantially outperforms both OSLA and FD, yielding higher decoder efficiency across a broad range of code distances. Numerically, as the code distance increases from 5 to 15, AdAbort yields an improvement that increases from 5% to 35% for surface codes and from 7% to 60% for color codes. To our knowledge, these are the first adaptive abort schemes considered for QEC. Our results highlight the potential importance of abort rules for increasing efficiency as we scale to large, resource-intensive quantum architectures. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Probability (math.PR) Cite as: arXiv:2602.16929 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2602.16929v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.16929 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Sanidhay Bhambay [view email] [v1] Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:43:04 UTC (3,346 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Adaptive Aborting Schemes for Quantum Error Correction Decoding, by Sanidhay Bhambay and 3 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-02 Change to browse by: math math.PR References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)