Logical accreditation: a framework for efficient certification of fault-tolerant computations

Abstract

As fault-tolerant quantum computers scale, certifying the accuracy of computations performed with encoded logical qubits will soon become classically intractable. This creates a critical need for scalable, device-independent certification methods. In this work, we introduce logical accreditation, a framework for efficiently certifying the correctness of quantum computations performed on logical qubits. Our protocol is robust against general noise models, far beyond those typically considered in performance analyses of quantum error-correcting codes. Through numerical simulations, we demonstrate that logical accreditation can scalably certify quantum advantage experiments and indicate the crossover point where encoded computations begin to outperform physical computations. The framework also enables evaluation of whether logical error rates are sufficiently low that error mitigation can be efficiently performed, extends entropy benchmarking to the regime of fault-tolerant computation, and upper bounds the infidelity of the logical output state of a computation. Underlying the framework is a novel randomised compilation scheme that converts arbitrary logical circuit noise into stochastic Pauli noise. This scheme includes a method for twirling non-transversal logical gates beyond the standard $T$ gate, resolving an open problem posed by [Piveteau et al. PRL 127, 200505 (2021)]. By bridging fault-tolerant computation and computational certification, logical accreditation offers a scalable, practical means of certifying the accuracy of quantum computations performed using encoded logical qubits.