Preregistered Evaluation of an Upstream Conditioning Architecture in Quantum Error Correction

This preregistration describes a confirmatory study of an upstream conditioning architecture in a quantum error-correction workflow. The project’s purpose is to test whether an intervention applied prior to the primary decoder produces a real and reproducible decoder-relevant effect, remains compatible with more than one downstream decoder family, generates a measurable exposed-observable statistical footprint, and improves or preserves performance across a preregistered regime rather than only at a single operating point. The study is intentionally limited to architecture-level evaluation, with the public claim set confined to exposed observables, frozen transformations, preregistered statistical tests, explicit negative controls, and bounded interpretation rules. The confirmatory design is organized around five preregistered tests: category existence, decoder compatibility, structural footprint, observable statistical signature, and regime robustness. Across these tests, the central comparison is between a baseline control pipeline and a conditioned pipeline in which the upstream intervention is applied while all non-conditioning settings are held fixed. The study uses frozen observables and frozen execution rules, including matched seeds, shot counts, code distances, physical error rates, geometry, and baseline decoder settings, so that any supported effect can be interpreted as evidence about the architecture under test rather than as a byproduct of post hoc tuning. To preserve a clean-room boundary, the registration restricts primary analysis to exposed, decoder-facing quantities only. These include logical failure, an exposed defect-count summary, and an exposed decoder-difficulty proxy, along with a locked scalar error-load construction derived from control-only standardization. The study does not rely on decoder-internal state variables, hidden confidence traces, or implementation-specific internal diagnostics in its primary confirmatory analyses. This structure is intended to let readers evaluate whether the architecture leaves a reproducible footprint in decoder-facing behavior without disclosing reconstruction-level mechanism details. Expected outcomes are defined in confirmatory rather than speculative terms. If the preregistered hypotheses are supported, the study is expected to provide evidence that an upstream conditioning intervention exists as a real architectural category in QEC, acts before the primary decoder, is compatible with downstream decoding, changes decoder-relevant exposed structure, and produces a reproducible observable statistical footprint in logical-failure behavior. If support is absent, mixed, or null, those outcomes will still be recorded under the frozen rules without rescue through post hoc metric changes, reweighting, or reinterpretation. In either case, the expected result of the registration is a bounded, auditable public record of whether this architecture class shows reproducible category-level behavior under a preregistered confirmatory design. The preregistration is not intended to establish a unique mechanism identity, identify a privileged implementation, disclose implementation-specific reconstruction details, or support claims about exact targeting logic, suppression laws, subset-sizing logic, telemetry-governed control, or broader cross-domain theory narratives. Public-facing interpretation is therefore intentionally limited to category validation and exposed-observable behavior. This is meant to support rigorous public evaluation while preserving strict clean-room limits around protected implementation detail.