Capability-Gated Conformance Testing of Quantum Error-Correction Decoder Libraries
Abstract
A quantum error correction decoder is a library other people's results depend on, judged in one dominant way. Sample errors, decode, and count wrong logical observables. We ask what else can be checked there. Our conformance contract needs no oracle. One check asks that a returned correction explain the syndrome in the caller's index space. The other hands a decoder one instance under two presentations differing only in bookkeeping, where two feasible corrections of different weight prove the heavier is not minimum-weight. Verdicts are gated on what each library declares, so a firing contradicts a published guarantee. Nine configurations from five public libraries give three results. Documentation answers 4 of 54 capability questions. Bounded-distance correctness, the property callers most depend on, has a direct declaration yield of 0.0%, though its hypotheses hold in 62.1% of cases. Presentation sensitivity is real but shallow. One solver moved to a 26% heavier correction under a different numbering, which reaches the logical class at most once in twenty thousand shots. Established evaluation misses corruptions that preserve logical parity, while one summation over the caller's weights catches every one we injected. All 639 certificates ship as bundles a standalone verifier re-derives from first principles.
Related
- Bunny Codes: Broadening Superconducting Quantum Error Correction Capability through Advanced Control Engineering
- Design-Time Conformance Checking for Pulse-Level Quantum Control
- QuSema: Detecting Silent Bugs in Quantum Libraries via Quantum-knowledge-enhanced Agents
- QC-Stark: A Multi-Task Benchmark Revealing Capability Dissociations in LLMs Evaluated on Quantum Computing Tasks
- Entangling capability of coherently controlled quantum processes
BibTeX
@misc{shen2026capabilitygated,
title = {{Capability-Gated Conformance Testing of Quantum Error-Correction Decoder Libraries}},
author = {Jiachen Shen and Hui Zhong},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.07035},
eprint = {2609.07035},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07035},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Capability-Gated Conformance Testing of Quantum Error-Correction Decoder Libraries
AU - Jiachen Shen
AU - Hui Zhong
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/07
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.07035
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07035
AB - A quantum error correction decoder is a library other people's results depend on, judged in one dominant way. Sample errors, decode, and count wrong logical observables. We ask what else can be checked there. Our conformance contract needs no oracle. One check asks that a returned correction explain the syndrome in the caller's index space. The other hands a decoder one instance under two presentations differing only in bookkeeping, where two feasible corrections of different weight prove the heavier is not minimum-weight. Verdicts are gated on what each library declares, so a firing contradicts a published guarantee. Nine configurations from five public libraries give three results. Documentation answers 4 of 54 capability questions. Bounded-distance correctness, the property callers most depend on, has a direct declaration yield of 0.0%, though its hypotheses hold in 62.1% of cases. Presentation sensitivity is real but shallow. One solver moved to a 26% heavier correction under a different numbering, which reaches the logical class at most once in twenty thousand shots. Established evaluation misses corruptions that preserve logical parity, while one summation over the caller's weights catches every one we injected. All 639 certificates ship as bundles a standalone verifier re-derives from first principles.
ER -