Xinyi Chen, Elad Hazan, Tongyang Li et al. · princeton
The problem of efficient quantum state learning, also called shadow tomography, aims to comprehend an unknown $d$-dimensional quantum state through POVMs. Yet, these states are rarely static; they evolve due to factors such as measurements, environmental noise, or inherent Hamiltonian state transitions. This paper leverages techniques from adaptive online learning to keep pace with such state changes. The key metrics considered for learning in these mutable environments are enhanced notions of regret, specifically adaptive and dynamic regret. We present adaptive and dynamic regret bounds for online shadow tomography, which are polynomial in the number of qubits and sublinear in the number of measurements. To support our theoretical findings, we include numerical experiments that validate our proposed models.
Andrew M. Childs, Tongyang Li, Jin-Peng Liu et al.
Given a convex function $f\colon\mathbb{R}^{d}\to\mathbb{R}$, the problem of sampling from a distribution $\propto e^{-f(x)}$ is called log-concave sampling. This task has wide applications in machine learning, physics, statistics, etc. In this work, we develop quantum algorithms for sampling log-concave distributions and for estimating their normalizing constants $\int_{\mathbb{R}^d}e^{-f(x)}\mathrm{d} x$. First, we use underdamped Langevin diffusion to develop quantum algorithms that match the query complexity (in terms of the condition number $κ$ and dimension $d$) of analogous classical algorithms that use gradient (first-order) queries, even though the quantum algorithms use only evaluation (zeroth-order) queries. For estimating normalizing constants, these algorithms also achieve quadratic speedup in the multiplicative error $ε$. Second, we develop quantum Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithms with query complexity $\widetilde{O}(κ^{1/2}d)$ and $\widetilde{O}(κ^{1/2}d^{3/2}/ε)$ for log-concave sampling and normalizing constant estimation, respectively, achieving polynomial speedups in $κ,d,ε$ over the best known classical algorithms by exploiting quantum analogs of the Monte Carlo method and quantum walks. We also prove a $1/ε^{1-o(1)}$ quantum lower bound for estimating normalizing constants, implying near-optimality of our quantum algorithms in $ε$.
Classical algorithms are often not effective for solving nonconvex optimization problems where local minima are separated by high barriers. In this paper, we explore possible quantum speedups for nonconvex optimization by leveraging the global effect of quantum tunneling. Specifically, we introduce a quantum algorithm termed the quantum tunneling walk (QTW) and apply it to nonconvex problems where local minima are approximately global minima. We show that QTW achieves quantum speedup over classical stochastic gradient descents (SGD) when the barriers between different local minima are high but thin and the minima are flat. Based on this observation, we construct a specific double-well landscape, where classical algorithms cannot efficiently hit one target well knowing the other well but QTW can when given proper initial states near the known well. Finally, we corroborate our findings with numerical experiments.
We propose the first online quantum algorithm for solving zero-sum games with $\widetilde O(1)$ regret under the game setting. Moreover, our quantum algorithm computes an $\varepsilon$-approximate Nash equilibrium of an $m \times n$ matrix zero-sum game in quantum time $\widetilde O(\sqrt{m+n}/\varepsilon^{2.5})$. Our algorithm uses standard quantum inputs and generates classical outputs with succinct descriptions, facilitating end-to-end applications. Technically, our online quantum algorithm "quantizes" classical algorithms based on the optimistic multiplicative weight update method. At the heart of our algorithm is a fast quantum multi-sampling procedure for the Gibbs sampling problem, which may be of independent interest.
Multi-arm bandit (MAB) and stochastic linear bandit (SLB) are important models in reinforcement learning, and it is well-known that classical algorithms for bandits with time horizon $T$ suffer $Ω(\sqrt{T})$ regret. In this paper, we study MAB and SLB with quantum reward oracles and propose quantum algorithms for both models with $O(\mbox{poly}(\log T))$ regrets, exponentially improving the dependence in terms of $T$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first provable quantum speedup for regrets of bandit problems and in general exploitation in reinforcement learning. Compared to previous literature on quantum exploration algorithms for MAB and reinforcement learning, our quantum input model is simpler and only assumes quantum oracles for each individual arm.
We initiate the study of quantum algorithms for optimizing approximately convex functions. Given a convex set ${\cal K}\subseteq\mathbb{R}^{n}$ and a function $F\colon\mathbb{R}^{n}\to\mathbb{R}$ such that there exists a convex function $f\colon\mathcal{K}\to\mathbb{R}$ satisfying $\sup_{x\in{\cal K}}|F(x)-f(x)|\leq ε/n$, our quantum algorithm finds an $x^{*}\in{\cal K}$ such that $F(x^{*})-\min_{x\in{\cal K}} F(x)\leqε$ using $\tilde{O}(n^{3})$ quantum evaluation queries to $F$. This achieves a polynomial quantum speedup compared to the best-known classical algorithms. As an application, we give a quantum algorithm for zeroth-order stochastic convex bandits with $\tilde{O}(n^{5}\log^{2} T)$ regret, an exponential speedup in $T$ compared to the classical $Ω(\sqrt{T})$ lower bound. Technically, we achieve quantum speedup in $n$ by exploiting a quantum framework of simulated annealing and adopting a quantum version of the hit-and-run walk. Our speedup in $T$ for zeroth-order stochastic convex bandits is due to a quadratic quantum speedup in multiplicative error of mean estimation.
While quantum reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted a surge of attention recently, its theoretical understanding is limited. In particular, it remains elusive how to design provably efficient quantum RL algorithms that can address the exploration-exploitation trade-off. To this end, we propose a novel UCRL-style algorithm that takes advantage of quantum computing for tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs) with $S$ states, $A$ actions, and horizon $H$, and establish an $\mathcal{O}(\mathrm{poly}(S, A, H, \log T))$ worst-case regret for it, where $T$ is the number of episodes. Furthermore, we extend our results to quantum RL with linear function approximation, which is capable of handling problems with large state spaces. Specifically, we develop a quantum algorithm based on value target regression (VTR) for linear mixture MDPs with $d$-dimensional linear representation and prove that it enjoys $\mathcal{O}(\mathrm{poly}(d, H, \log T))$ regret. Our algorithms are variants of UCRL/UCRL-VTR algorithms in classical RL, which also leverage a novel combination of lazy updating mechanisms and quantum estimation subroutines. This is the key to breaking the $Ω(\sqrt{T})$-regret barrier in classical RL. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work studying the online exploration in quantum RL with provable logarithmic worst-case regret.
$k$-Clustering in $\mathbb{R}^d$ (e.g., $k$-median and $k$-means) is a fundamental machine learning problem. While near-linear time approximation algorithms were known in the classical setting for a dataset with cardinality $n$, it remains open to find sublinear-time quantum algorithms. We give quantum algorithms that find coresets for $k$-clustering in $\mathbb{R}^d$ with $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{nk}d^{3/2})$ query complexity. Our coreset reduces the input size from $n$ to $\mathrm{poly}(kε^{-1}d)$, so that existing $α$-approximation algorithms for clustering can run on top of it and yield $(1 + ε)α$-approximation. This eventually yields a quadratic speedup for various $k$-clustering approximation algorithms. We complement our algorithm with a nearly matching lower bound, that any quantum algorithm must make $Ω(\sqrt{nk})$ queries in order to achieve even $O(1)$-approximation for $k$-clustering.
We initiate the study of utilizing Quantum Langevin Dynamics (QLD) to solve optimization problems, particularly those non-convex objective functions that present substantial obstacles for traditional gradient descent algorithms. Specifically, we examine the dynamics of a system coupled with an infinite heat bath. This interaction induces both random quantum noise and a deterministic damping effect to the system, which nudge the system towards a steady state that hovers near the global minimum of objective functions. We theoretically prove the convergence of QLD in convex landscapes, demonstrating that the average energy of the system can approach zero in the low temperature limit with an exponential decay rate correlated with the evolution time. Numerically, we first show the energy dissipation capability of QLD by retracing its origins to spontaneous emission. Furthermore, we conduct detailed discussion of the impact of each parameter. Finally, based on the observations when comparing QLD with classical Fokker-Plank-Smoluchowski equation, we propose a time-dependent QLD by making temperature and $\hbar$ time-dependent parameters, which can be theoretically proven to converge better than the time-independent case and also outperforms a series of state-of-the-art quantum and classical optimization algorithms in many non-convex landscapes.
When optimizing machine learning models, there are various scenarios where gradient computations are challenging or even infeasible. Furthermore, in reinforcement learning (RL), preference-based RL that only compares between options has wide applications, including reinforcement learning with human feedback in large language models. In this paper, we systematically study optimization of a smooth function $f\colon\mathbb{R}^n\to\mathbb{R}$ only assuming an oracle that compares function values at two points and tells which is larger. When $f$ is convex, we give two algorithms using $\tilde{O}(n/ε)$ and $\tilde{O}(n^{2})$ comparison queries to find an $ε$-optimal solution, respectively. When $f$ is nonconvex, our algorithm uses $\tilde{O}(n/ε^2)$ comparison queries to find an $ε$-approximate stationary point. All these results match the best-known zeroth-order algorithms with function evaluation queries in $n$ dependence, thus suggest that \emph{comparisons are all you need for optimizing smooth functions using derivative-free methods}. In addition, we also give an algorithm for escaping saddle points and reaching an $ε$-second order stationary point of a nonconvex $f$, using $\tilde{O}(n^{1.5}/ε^{2.5})$ comparison queries.
Computing Nash equilibria of zero-sum games in classical and quantum settings is extensively studied. For general-sum games, computing Nash equilibria is PPAD-hard and the computing of a more general concept called correlated equilibria has been widely explored in game theory. In this paper, we initiate the study of quantum algorithms for computing $\varepsilon$-approximate correlated equilibria (CE) and coarse correlated equilibria (CCE) in multi-player normal-form games. Our approach utilizes quantum improvements to the multi-scale Multiplicative Weight Update (MWU) method for CE calculations, achieving a query complexity of $\tilde{O}(m\sqrt{n})$ for fixed $\varepsilon$. For CCE, we extend techniques from quantum algorithms for zero-sum games to multi-player settings, achieving query complexity $\tilde{O}(m\sqrt{n}/\varepsilon^{2.5})$. Both algorithms demonstrate a near-optimal scaling in the number of players $m$ and actions $n$, as confirmed by our quantum query lower bounds.
Bandits with knapsacks (BwK) constitute a fundamental model that combines aspects of stochastic integer programming with online learning. Classical algorithms for BwK with a time horizon $T$ achieve a problem-independent regret bound of ${O}(\sqrt{T})$ and a problem-dependent bound of ${O}(\log T)$. In this paper, we initiate the study of the BwK model in the setting of quantum computing, where both reward and resource consumption can be accessed via quantum oracles. We establish both problem-independent and problem-dependent regret bounds for quantum BwK algorithms. For the problem-independent case, we demonstrate that a quantum approach can improve the classical regret bound by a factor of $(1+\sqrt{B/\mathrm{OPT}_\mathrm{LP}})$, where $B$ is budget constraint in BwK and $\mathrm{OPT}_{\mathrm{LP}}$ denotes the optimal value of a linear programming relaxation of the BwK problem. For the problem-dependent setting, we develop a quantum algorithm using an inexact quantum linear programming solver. This algorithm achieves a quadratic improvement in terms of the problem-dependent parameters, as well as a polynomial speedup of time complexity on problem's dimensions compared to classical counterparts. Compared to previous works on quantum algorithms for multi-armed bandits, our study is the first to consider bandit models with resource constraints and hence shed light on operations research.
Finite-sum optimization has wide applications in machine learning, covering important problems such as support vector machines, regression, etc. In this paper, we initiate the study of solving finite-sum optimization problems by quantum computing. Specifically, let $f_1,\ldots,f_n\colon\mathbb{R}^d\to\mathbb{R}$ be $\ell$-smooth convex functions and $ψ\colon\mathbb{R}^d\to\mathbb{R}$ be a $μ$-strongly convex proximal function. The goal is to find an $ε$-optimal point for $F(\mathbf{x})=\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^n f_i(\mathbf{x})+ψ(\mathbf{x})$. We give a quantum algorithm with complexity $\tilde{O}\big(n+\sqrt{d}+\sqrt{\ell/μ}\big(n^{1/3}d^{1/3}+n^{-2/3}d^{5/6}\big)\big)$, improving the classical tight bound $\tildeΘ\big(n+\sqrt{n\ell/μ}\big)$. We also prove a quantum lower bound $\tildeΩ(n+n^{3/4}(\ell/μ)^{1/4})$ when $d$ is large enough. Both our quantum upper and lower bounds can extend to the cases where $ψ$ is not necessarily strongly convex, or each $f_i$ is Lipschitz but not necessarily smooth. In addition, when $F$ is nonconvex, our quantum algorithm can find an $ε$-critial point using $\tilde{O}(n+\ell(d^{1/3}n^{1/3}+\sqrt{d})/ε^2)$ queries.
Escaping saddle points is a central research topic in nonconvex optimization. In this paper, we propose a simple gradient-based algorithm such that for a smooth function $f\colon\mathbb{R}^n\to\mathbb{R}$, it outputs an $ε$-approximate second-order stationary point in $\tilde{O}(\log n/ε^{1.75})$ iterations. Compared to the previous state-of-the-art algorithms by Jin et al. with $\tilde{O}((\log n)^{4}/ε^{2})$ or $\tilde{O}((\log n)^{6}/ε^{1.75})$ iterations, our algorithm is polynomially better in terms of $\log n$ and matches their complexities in terms of $1/ε$. For the stochastic setting, our algorithm outputs an $ε$-approximate second-order stationary point in $\tilde{O}((\log n)^{2}/ε^{4})$ iterations. Technically, our main contribution is an idea of implementing a robust Hessian power method using only gradients, which can find negative curvature near saddle points and achieve the polynomial speedup in $\log n$ compared to the perturbed gradient descent methods. Finally, we also perform numerical experiments that support our results.
Tongyang Li, Chunhao Wang, Shouvanik Chakrabarti et al.
We investigate sublinear classical and quantum algorithms for matrix games, a fundamental problem in optimization and machine learning, with provable guarantees. Given a matrix $A\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$, sublinear algorithms for the matrix game $\min_{x\in\mathcal{X}}\max_{y\in\mathcal{Y}} y^{\top} Ax$ were previously known only for two special cases: (1) $\mathcal{Y}$ being the $\ell_{1}$-norm unit ball, and (2) $\mathcal{X}$ being either the $\ell_{1}$- or the $\ell_{2}$-norm unit ball. We give a sublinear classical algorithm that can interpolate smoothly between these two cases: for any fixed $q\in (1,2]$, we solve the matrix game where $\mathcal{X}$ is a $\ell_{q}$-norm unit ball within additive error $ε$ in time $\tilde{O}((n+d)/{ε^{2}})$. We also provide a corresponding sublinear quantum algorithm that solves the same task in time $\tilde{O}((\sqrt{n}+\sqrt{d})\textrm{poly}(1/ε))$ with a quadratic improvement in both $n$ and $d$. Both our classical and quantum algorithms are optimal in the dimension parameters $n$ and $d$ up to poly-logarithmic factors. Finally, we propose sublinear classical and quantum algorithms for the approximate Carathéodory problem and the $\ell_{q}$-margin support vector machines as applications.
Identifying the best arm of a multi-armed bandit is a central problem in bandit optimization. We study a quantum computational version of this problem with coherent oracle access to states encoding the reward probabilities of each arm as quantum amplitudes. Specifically, we show that we can find the best arm with fixed confidence using $\tilde{O}\bigl(\sqrt{\sum_{i=2}^nΔ^{\smash{-2}}_i}\bigr)$ quantum queries, where $Δ_{i}$ represents the difference between the mean reward of the best arm and the $i^\text{th}$-best arm. This algorithm, based on variable-time amplitude amplification and estimation, gives a quadratic speedup compared to the best possible classical result. We also prove a matching quantum lower bound (up to poly-logarithmic factors).
Shouvanik Chakrabarti, Yiming Huang, Tongyang Li et al.
The study of quantum generative models is well-motivated, not only because of its importance in quantum machine learning and quantum chemistry but also because of the perspective of its implementation on near-term quantum machines. Inspired by previous studies on the adversarial training of classical and quantum generative models, we propose the first design of quantum Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks (WGANs), which has been shown to improve the robustness and the scalability of the adversarial training of quantum generative models even on noisy quantum hardware. Specifically, we propose a definition of the Wasserstein semimetric between quantum data, which inherits a few key theoretical merits of its classical counterpart. We also demonstrate how to turn the quantum Wasserstein semimetric into a concrete design of quantum WGANs that can be efficiently implemented on quantum machines. Our numerical study, via classical simulation of quantum systems, shows the more robust and scalable numerical performance of our quantum WGANs over other quantum GAN proposals. As a surprising application, our quantum WGAN has been used to generate a 3-qubit quantum circuit of ~50 gates that well approximates a 3-qubit 1-d Hamiltonian simulation circuit that requires over 10k gates using standard techniques.
We present an algorithmic framework for quantum-inspired classical algorithms on close-to-low-rank matrices, generalizing the series of results started by Tang's breakthrough quantum-inspired algorithm for recommendation systems [STOC'19]. Motivated by quantum linear algebra algorithms and the quantum singular value transformation (SVT) framework of Gilyén, Su, Low, and Wiebe [STOC'19], we develop classical algorithms for SVT that run in time independent of input dimension, under suitable quantum-inspired sampling assumptions. Our results give compelling evidence that in the corresponding QRAM data structure input model, quantum SVT does not yield exponential quantum speedups. Since the quantum SVT framework generalizes essentially all known techniques for quantum linear algebra, our results, combined with sampling lemmas from previous work, suffice to generalize all recent results about dequantizing quantum machine learning algorithms. In particular, our classical SVT framework recovers and often improves the dequantization results on recommendation systems, principal component analysis, supervised clustering, support vector machines, low-rank regression, and semidefinite program solving. We also give additional dequantization results on low-rank Hamiltonian simulation and discriminant analysis. Our improvements come from identifying the key feature of the quantum-inspired input model that is at the core of all prior quantum-inspired results: $\ell^2$-norm sampling can approximate matrix products in time independent of their dimension. We reduce all our main results to this fact, making our exposition concise, self-contained, and intuitive.
We investigate quantum algorithms for classification, a fundamental problem in machine learning, with provable guarantees. Given $n$ $d$-dimensional data points, the state-of-the-art (and optimal) classical algorithm for training classifiers with constant margin runs in $\tilde{O}(n+d)$ time. We design sublinear quantum algorithms for the same task running in $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{n} +\sqrt{d})$ time, a quadratic improvement in both $n$ and $d$. Moreover, our algorithms use the standard quantization of the classical input and generate the same classical output, suggesting minimal overheads when used as subroutines for end-to-end applications. We also demonstrate a tight lower bound (up to poly-log factors) and discuss the possibility of implementation on near-term quantum machines. As a side result, we also give sublinear quantum algorithms for approximating the equilibria of $n$-dimensional matrix zero-sum games with optimal complexity $\tildeΘ(\sqrt{n})$.
A fundamental problem in statistics and learning theory is to test properties of distributions. We show that quantum computers can solve such problems with significant speed-ups. In particular, we give fast quantum algorithms for testing closeness between unknown distributions, testing independence between two distributions, and estimating the Shannon / von Neumann entropy of distributions. The distributions can be either classical or quantum, however our quantum algorithms require coherent quantum access to a process preparing the samples. Our results build on the recent technique of quantum singular value transformation, combined with more standard tricks such as divide-and-conquer. The presented approach is a natural fit for distributional property testing both in the classical and the quantum case, demonstrating the first speed-ups for testing properties of density operators that can be accessed coherently rather than only via sampling; for classical distributions our algorithms significantly improve the precision dependence of some earlier results.
Semidefinite programming (SDP) is a central topic in mathematical optimization with extensive studies on its efficient solvers. In this paper, we present a proof-of-principle sublinear-time algorithm for solving SDPs with low-rank constraints; specifically, given an SDP with $m$ constraint matrices, each of dimension $n$ and rank $r$, our algorithm can compute any entry and efficient descriptions of the spectral decomposition of the solution matrix. The algorithm runs in time $O(m\cdot\mathrm{poly}(\log n,r,1/\varepsilon))$ given access to a sampling-based low-overhead data structure for the constraint matrices, where $\varepsilon$ is the precision of the solution. In addition, we apply our algorithm to a quantum state learning task as an application. Technically, our approach aligns with 1) SDP solvers based on the matrix multiplicative weight (MMW) framework by Arora and Kale [TOC '12]; 2) sampling-based dequantizing framework pioneered by Tang [STOC '19]. In order to compute the matrix exponential required in the MMW framework, we introduce two new techniques that may be of independent interest: $\bullet$ Weighted sampling: assuming sampling access to each individual constraint matrix $A_{1},\ldots,A_τ$, we propose a procedure that gives a good approximation of $A=A_{1}+\cdots+A_τ$. $\bullet$ Symmetric approximation: we propose a sampling procedure that gives the \emph{spectral decomposition} of a low-rank Hermitian matrix $A$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first sampling-based algorithm for spectral decomposition, as previous works only give singular values and vectors.