Accelerating BP-OSD Decoder for QLDPC Codes with Local Syndrome-Based Preprocessing
Wenxuan Fan, Yasunari Suzuki, Gokul Subramanian Ravi, Yosuke Ueno, Koji Inoue, Teruo Tanimoto
Published: 2025/9/2
Abstract
Due to the high error rate of qubits, detecting and correcting errors is essential for achieving fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC). Quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes are one of the most promising quantum error correction (QEC) methods due to their high encoding rates. Belief Propagation-Ordered Statistics Decoding (BP-OSD) is the state-of-the-art decoder for QLDPC codes, but it suffers from high decoding latency. We find from experiments that a large portion of this latency originates from the iterative BP stage, making BP runtime reduction a key optimization target. In this paper, we propose a lightweight preprocessing step that utilizes local syndrome patterns to detect likely trivial error events and feed them as hints into BP-OSD. These hints reduce the number of BP iterations and the overall decoding time. On Bivariate Bicycle codes, the proposed method achieves more than an 80% reduction in BP iterations and total decoding time for the $[[144,12,12]]$ code at a physical error rate of 0.05%, while maintaining the original logical error rate of BP-OSD.