On estimating the entropy of shallow circuit outputs
Alexandru Gheorghiu, Matty J. Hoban
备注：
Substantial changes with respect to v1. Fixed typos, small bugs and updated references. Clarified that our results apply for circuits with unbounded fan-out gates. Included a version of the entropy estimation problem, known as the entropy ratio problem, for which we proved similar hardness results. Added discussion on follow-up works which introduced the notion of quantum pseudoentanglement
Estimating the entropy of probability distributions and quantum states is a fundamental task in information processing. Here, we examine the hardness of this task for the case of probability distributions or quantum states produced by shallow circuits. Specifically, we show that entropy estimation for distributions or states produced by either log-depth circuits or constant-depth circuits with gates of bounded fan-in and unbounded fan-out is at least as hard as the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem, and thus believed to be intractable even for efficient quantum computation. This illustrates that quantum circuits do not need to be complex to render the computation of entropy a difficult task. We also give complexity-theoretic evidence that this problem for log-depth circuits is not as hard as its counterpart with general polynomial-size circuits, seemingly occupying an intermediate hardness regime. Finally, we discuss potential future applications of our work for quantum gravity research by relating our results to the complexity of the bulk-to-boundary dictionary of AdS/CFT.
We study the computational power of shallow quantum circuits with $O(\log n)$ initialized and $n^{O(1)}$ uninitialized ancillary qubits, where $n$ is the input length and the initial state of the uninitialized ancillary qubits is arbitrary. First, we show that such a circuit can compute any symmetric function on $n$ bits that is classically computable in polynomial time. Then, we regard such a circuit as an oracle and show that a polynomial-time classical algorithm with the oracle can estimate the elements of any unitary matrix corresponding to a constant-depth quantum circuit on $n$ qubits. S…
Recently, Bravyi, Gosset, and König (Science, 2018) exhibited a search problem called the 2D Hidden Linear Function (2D HLF) problem that can be solved exactly by a constant-depth quantum circuit using bounded fan-in gates (or QNC^0 circuits), but cannot be solved by any constant-depth classical circuit using bounded fan-in AND, OR, and NOT gates (or NC^0 circuits). In other words, they exhibited a search problem in QNC^0 that is not in NC^0. We strengthen their result by proving that the 2D HLF problem is not contained in AC^0, the class of classical, polynomial-size, constant-depth circuits …
The Power of Shallow-depth Toffoli and Qudit Quantum Circuits
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学信息学院）；International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory（伊比利亚纳米技术国际实验室）
Recent works by Bravyi, Gosset and König (Science 2018), Bene Watts et al. (STOC 2019), Coudron, Stark and Vidick (QIP 2019) and Le Gall (CCC 2019) have shown unconditional separations between the computational powers of shallow (i.e., small-depth) quantum and classical circuits: quantum circuits can solve in constant depth computational problems that require logarithmic depth to solve with classical circuits. Using quantum error correction, Bravyi, Gosset, König and Tomamichel (Nature Physics 2020) further proved that a similar separation still persists even if quantum circuits are subject to…
We prove that constant-depth quantum circuits are more powerful than their classical counterparts. To this end we introduce a non-oracular version of the Bernstein-Vazirani problem which we call the 2D Hidden Linear Function problem. An instance of the problem is specified by a quadratic form q that maps n-bit strings to integers modulo four. The goal is to identify a linear boolean function which describes the action of q on a certain subset of n-bit strings. We prove that any classical probabilistic circuit composed of bounded fan-in gates that solves the 2D Hidden Linear Function problem wi…
Recently Bravyi, Gosset and König (Science 2018) proved an unconditional separation between the computational powers of small-depth quantum and classical circuits for a relation. In this paper we show a similar separation in the average-case setting that gives stronger evidence of the superiority of small-depth quantum computation: we construct a computational task that can be solved on all inputs by a quantum circuit of constant depth with bounded-fanin gates (a "shallow" quantum circuit) and show that any classical circuit with bounded-fanin gates solving this problem on a non-negligible fra…
Multipartite entanglement is of important resources for quantum communication and quantum computation. Our goal in this paper is to characterize general multipartite entangled states according to shallow quantum circuits. We firstly prove any genuinely multipartite entanglement on finite-dimensional spaces can be generated by using 2-layer shallow quantum circuit consisting of two biseparable quantum channels, which the smallest nontrivial circuit depth in the shallow quantum circuit model. We further propose a semi-device-independent entanglement model depending on the local connection abilit…
Recent work of Bravyi et al. and follow-up work by Bene Watts et al. demonstrates a quantum advantage for shallow circuits: constant-depth quantum circuits can perform a task which constant-depth classical (i.e., AC$^0$) circuits cannot. Their results have the advantage that the quantum circuit is fairly practical, and their proofs are free of hardness assumptions (e.g., factoring is classically hard, etc.). Unfortunately, constant-depth classical circuits are too weak to yield a convincing real-world demonstration of quantum advantage. We attempt to hold on to the advantages of the above resu…
Recent work by Bravyi et al. constructs a relation problem that a noisy constant-depth quantum circuit (QNC$^0$) can solve with near certainty (probability $1 - o(1)$), but that any bounded fan-in constant-depth classical circuit (NC$^0$) fails with some constant probability. We show that this robustness to noise can be achieved in the other low-depth quantum/classical circuit separations in this area. In particular, we show a general strategy for adding noise tolerance to the interactive protocols of Grier and Schaeffer. As a consequence, we obtain an unconditional separation between noisy QN…
We prove that a classical computer can efficiently sample from the photon-number probability distribution of a Gaussian state prepared by using an optical circuit that is shallow and local. Our work generalizes previous known results for qubits to the continuous-variable domain. The key to our proof is the observation that the adjacency matrices characterizing the Gaussian states generated by shallow and local circuits have small bandwidth. To exploit this structure, we devise fast algorithms to calculate loop hafnians of banded matrices. Since sampling from deep optical circuits with exponent…
Random quantum circuits are commonly viewed as hard to simulate classically. In some regimes this has been formally conjectured, and there had been no evidence against the more general possibility that for circuits with uniformly random gates, approximate simulation of typical instances is almost as hard as exact simulation. We prove that this is not the case by exhibiting a shallow circuit family with uniformly random gates that cannot be efficiently classically simulated near-exactly under standard hardness assumptions, but can be simulated approximately for all but a superpolynomially small…
The linear cross-entropy benchmark (Linear XEB) has been used as a test for procedures simulating quantum circuits. Given a quantum circuit $C$ with $n$ inputs and outputs and purported simulator whose output is distributed according to a distribution $p$ over $\{0,1\}^n$, the linear XEB fidelity of the simulator is $\mathcal{F}_{C}(p) = 2^n \mathbb{E}_{x \sim p} q_C(x) -1$ where $q_C(x)$ is the probability that $x$ is output from the distribution $C|0^n\rangle$. A trivial simulator (e.g., the uniform distribution) satisfies $\mathcal{F}_C(p)=0$, while Google's noisy quantum simulation of a 53…
We present two results on the subject of quantum contextuality and cohomology, and non-locality and quantum advantage with shallow circuits. Abramsky et al. showed that a range of examples of quantum contextuality is detected by a cohomological invariant based on Čech cohomology. However, the approach does not give a complete cohomological characterisation of contextuality. A different cohomological approach to contextuality was introduced by Okay et al. Their approach exploits the algebraic structure of the Pauli operators and their qudit generalisations known as Weyl operators. We give an ab…
Quantum critical point is one key concept for studying many-body physics but its investigation may be resource-demanding even for a quantum computer due to the intrinsic complexity. In this paper, we propose an approach based on variational quantum eigensolver(VQE), dubbed as Delta-VQE, for locating the quantum critical point using only shallow quantum circuits. With Delta-VQE, the critical point can be identified as a most confusing point, quantified as zero difference between two variational energies that use two representative reference states of distinct phases of matter. Remarkably, the s…
Recently, constant-depth quantum circuits are proved more powerful than their classical counterparts at solving certain problems, e.g., the two-dimensional (2D) hidden linear function (HLF) problem regarding a symmetric binary matrix. To further investigate the boundary between classical and quantum computing models, in this work we propose a high-performance two-stage classical scheme to solve a full-sampling variant of the 2D HLF problem, which combines traditional classical parallel algorithms and a gate-based classical circuit model together for exactly simulating the target shallow quantu…
The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), which is a variational quantum algorithm, aims to give sub-optimal solutions of combinatorial optimization problems. It is widely believed that QAOA has the potential to demonstrate application-level quantum advantages in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum(NISQ) processors with shallow circuit depth. Since the core of QAOA is the computation of expectation values of the problem Hamiltonian, an important practical question is whether we can find an efficient classical algorithm to solve quantum mean value in the case of general shallow qu…
We focus on the depth optimization of CNOT circuits on hardwares with limited connectivity. We adapt the algorithm from Kutin et al. that implements any $n$-qubit CNOT circuit in depth at most $5n$ on a Linear Nearest Neighbour (LNN) architecture. Our proposal is a block version of Kutin et al.'s algorithm that is scalable with the number of interactions available in the hardware: the more interactions we have the less the depth. We derive better theoretical upper bounds and we provide a simple implementation of the algorithm. Overall, we achieve better depth complexity for CNOT circuits on so…
An unconditional distribution learning advantage with shallow quantum circuits
Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）；Freie Universität Berlin（柏林自由大学）；Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute（弗劳恩霍夫海因里希·赫兹研究所）；Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie（亥姆霍兹柏林材料与能源研究中心）
Sample-efficient benchmarking of shallow all-to-all random quantum circuits
The College of William & Mary（威廉玛丽学院）；The University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, University of Maryland and NIST（马里兰大学和NIST联合量子信息与计算中心）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
Worst-case depth hierarchy for shallow quantum circuits
Hon Hai (Foxconn) Quantum Computing Research Center（鸿海（富士康）量子计算研究中心）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
We present a classical algorithm that, for any 3D geometrically-local, polylogarithmic-depth quantum circuit $C$ acting on $n$ qubits, and any bit string $x\in\{0,1\}^n$, can compute the quantity $|< x |C|0^{\otimes n}>|^2$ to within any inverse-polynomial additive error in quasi-polynomial time. It is known that it is $\#P$-hard to compute this same quantity to within $2^{-n^2}$ additive error [Mov20, KMM21]. The previous best known algorithm for this problem used $O(2^{n^{1/3}}\text{poly}(1/ε))$ time to compute probabilities to within additive error $ε$ [BGM20]. Notably, the [BGM20] paper in…
Entanglement scaling in matrix product state representation of smooth functions and their shallow quantum circuit approximations
Haiqu, Inc.（海奎公司）；Akhiezer Institute for Theoretical Physics, NSC KIPT（阿赫伊泽尔理论物理研究所，国家核子研究中心基辅物理技术研究所）；V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University（V.N.卡拉金哈尔科夫国立大学）；HSBC Lab, Emerging Technologies, Innovation & Ventures（汇丰实验室，新兴技术、创新与风险投资部门）；Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague（捷克布拉格工业大学电气工程学院）；Archimedes Research Unit on AI, Data Science and Algorithms, Athena Research Center（雅典娜研究中心人工智能、数据科学与算法研究组）；HSBC Service Delivery Sp. z o.o.（汇丰服务交付有限公司）；Department of Physics, University of Zürich（苏黎世大学物理系）
Experimentally Testable Quantum Advantage in Shallow Circuits
IonQ Inc.（IonQ公司）；Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, NIST/University of Maryland（量子信息与计算机科学联合中心，美国国家标准与技术研究院/马里兰大学）；University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland（马里兰大学高级计算机研究所，马里兰大学）；Universidad de Sevilla（塞维利亚大学）；Instituto Carlos I de Física Teórica y Computacional, Universidad de Sevilla（塞维利亚大学卡洛斯一世理论与计算物理研究所）
We prepare two dimensional states generated by shallow circuits composed of (1) one layer of two-qubit CZ gate or (2) a few layers of two-qubit random Clifford gate. After measuring all of the bulk qubits, we study the entanglement structure of the remaining qubits on the one dimensional boundary. In the first model, we observe that the competition between the bulk X and Z measurements can lead to an entanglement phase transition between an entangled volume law phase and a disentangled area law phase. We numerically evaluate the critical exponents and generalize this idea to other qudit system…
Unconditional Quantum Advantage for Sampling with Shallow Circuits
Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学量子计算研究所）；Department of Computer Science, Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学计算机科学系）；Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics（理论物理珀蒂默研究所）
Ensemble-learning error mitigation for variational quantum shallow-circuit classifiers
Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学基础与前沿研究院）；The Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学电子与计算机工程学系）；Graduate School of China Academy of Engineering Physics（中国工程物理研究院研究生院）
Quantum computers promise to revolutionise electronic simulations by overcoming the exponential scaling of many-electron problems. While electronic wave functions can be represented using a product of fermionic unitary operators, shallow quantum circuits for exact states have not yet been achieved. We construct universal wave functions from gate-efficient, symmetry-preserving fermionic operators by introducing an algorithm that globally optimises the wave function in the discrete ansatz design and the continuous parameter spaces. Our approach maximises the accuracy that can be obtained with ne…
University College Dublin（都柏林大学）；Equal1 Labs（Equal1实验室）
There is increasing interest in the development of gate-based quantum circuits for the training of machine learning models. Yet, little is understood concerning the parameters of circuit design, and the effects of noise and other measurement errors on the performance of quantum machine learning models. In this paper, we explore the practical implications of key circuit design parameters (number of qubits, depth etc.) using several standard machine learning datasets and IBM's Qiskit simulator. In total we evaluate over 6500 unique circuits with $n \approx 120700$ individual runs. We find that i…
Shallow instantaneous quantum polynomial-time circuits for generative modeling on noisy intermediate-scale quantum hardware
Eurecat, Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya（Eurecat，加泰罗尼亚技术中心）；Centre de Visió per Computador (CVC)（计算机视觉中心）；Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)（巴塞罗那自治大学）
Measurement-driven quantum advantages in shallow circuits
Dahlem Center for Complex Quantum Systems, Freie Universität Berlin（柏林自由大学达勒姆复杂量子系统中心）；Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie（柏林亥姆霍兹材料能源中心）
We present a classical algorithm that, for any $D$-dimensional geometrically-local, quantum circuit $C$ of polylogarithmic-depth, and any bit string $x \in {0,1}^n$, can compute the quantity $|<x|C|0^{\otimes n}>|^2$ to within any inverse-polynomial additive error in quasi-polynomial time, for any fixed dimension $D$. This is an extension of the result [CC21], which originally proved this result for $D = 3$. To see why this is interesting, note that, while the $D = 1$ case of this result follows from standard use of Matrix Product States, known for decades, the $D = 2$ case required novel and …
California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Google Quantum AI（谷歌量子人工智能团队）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
Prior work has shown that there exists a relation problem which can be solved with certainty by a constant-depth quantum circuit composed of geometrically local gates in two dimensions, but cannot be solved with high probability by any classical constant depth circuit composed of bounded fan-in gates. Here we provide two extensions of this result. Firstly, we show that a separation in computational power persists even when the constant-depth quantum circuit is restricted to geometrically local gates in one dimension. The corresponding quantum algorithm is the simplest we know of which achieves…
