Fan Chen

Cheng Chu, Lei Jiang, Martin Swany et al.

We propose a circuit-level backdoor attack, \textit{QTrojan}, against Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) in this paper. QTrojan is implemented by few quantum gates inserted into the variational quantum circuit of the victim QNN. QTrojan is much stealthier than a prior Data-Poisoning-based Backdoor Attack (DPBA), since it does not embed any trigger in the inputs of the victim QNN or require the access to original training datasets. Compared to a DPBA, QTrojan improves the clean data accuracy by 21\% and the attack success rate by 19.9\%.

Zhenxiao Fu, Leyi Zhao, Xuhong Zhang et al.

Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) have shown significant value across domains, with well-trained QNNs representing critical intellectual property often deployed via cloud-based QNN-as-a-Service (QNNaaS) platforms. Recent work has examined QNN model extraction attacks using classical and emerging quantum strategies. These attacks involve adversaries querying QNNaaS platforms to obtain labeled data for training local substitute QNNs that replicate the functionality of cloud-based models. However, existing approaches have largely overlooked the impact of varying quantum noise inherent in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers, limiting their effectiveness in real-world settings. To address this limitation, we propose the CopyQNN framework, which employs a three-step data cleaning method to eliminate noisy data based on its noise sensitivity. This is followed by the integration of contrastive and transfer learning within the quantum domain, enabling efficient training of substitute QNNs using a limited but cleaned set of queried data. Experimental results on NISQ computers demonstrate that a practical implementation of CopyQNN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art QNN extraction attacks, achieving an average performance improvement of 8.73% across all tasks while reducing the number of required queries by 90x, with only a modest increase in hardware overhead.

Fan Chen, Sinho Chewi, Constantinos Daskalakis et al.

We present algorithms for diffusion model sampling which obtain $δ$-error in $\mathrm{polylog}(1/δ)$ steps, given access to $\widetilde O(δ)$-accurate score estimates in $L^2$. This is an exponential improvement over all previous results. Specifically, under minimal data assumptions, the complexity is $\widetilde O(d\,\mathrm{polylog}(1/δ))$ where $d$ is the dimension of the data; under a non-uniform $L$-Lipschitz condition, the complexity is $\widetilde O(\sqrt{dL}\,\mathrm{polylog}(1/δ))$; and if the data distribution has intrinsic dimension $d_\star$, then the complexity reduces to $\widetilde O(d_\star\,\mathrm{polylog}(1/δ))$. Our approach also yields the first $\mathrm{polylog}(1/δ)$ complexity sampler for general log-concave distributions using only gradient evaluations.

Fan Chen, Sinho Chewi, Constantinos Daskalakis et al.

We show that high-accuracy guarantees for log-concave sampling -- that is, iteration and query complexities which scale as $\mathrm{poly}\log(1/δ)$, where $δ$ is the desired target accuracy -- are achievable using stochastic gradients with subexponential tails. Notably, this exhibits a separation with the problem of convex optimization, where stochasticity (even additive Gaussian noise) in the gradient oracle incurs $\mathrm{poly}(1/δ)$ queries. We also give an information-theoretic argument that light-tailed stochastic gradients are necessary for high accuracy: for example, in the bounded variance case, we show that the minimax-optimal query complexity scales as $Θ(1/δ)$. Our framework also provides similar high accuracy guarantees under stochastic zeroth order (value) queries.