What randomized benchmarking does and does not supply

Randomized benchmarking estimates partial gate-noise characteristics under its printed assumptions. Wallman and Flammia analyze the variance due to sampling random sequences and explicitly separate that variance from finite repetitions of each sequence WallmanFlammia. Their asymptotic variance formulas contain remainder terms; dropping such terms does not create an exact finite-sample theorem for this manuscript.

Our certificates sample complete decoder outputs directly. We do not import randomized-benchmarking sequence counts as decoder validation counts, do not infer the access audit from benchmarking, and do not replace mixed-target Choi testing with an average gate infidelity. Benchmarking can support a separate engineering ledger only when the assumptions and metric conversion are justified.