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

Abstract

Efficient and scalable decoding of quantum codes is essential for high-performance quantum error correction. In this work, we introduce Reliable Subset Reduction (RSR), a reliability-driven preprocessing framework that leverages belief propagation (BP) statistics to identify and remove highly reliable qubits, substantially reducing 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. Our BP+RSR+ADOSD framework extends naturally to circuit-level noise and can handle large-scale codes with more than $10^4$ error variables. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate improved performance over MWPM and Localized Statistics Decoding for a variety of CSS and non-CSS codes under the code-capacity noise model, and for rotated surface codes under realistic circuit-level noise. At low physical error rates, RSR reduces the effective problem size to as little as 1\% (e.g., for $ε=0.001$ in surface-code DEM), enabling higher-order OSD with drastically reduced computational complexity. These results highlight the practical efficiency and broad applicability of the BP+ADOSD framework for both theoretical and realistic quantum error correction scenarios.