Consider the problem of minimizing an expected logarithmic loss over either the probability simplex or the set of quantum density matrices. This problem includes tasks such as solving the Poisson inverse problem, computing the maximum-likelihood estimate for quantum state tomography, and approximating positive semi-definite matrix permanents with the currently tightest approximation ratio. Although the optimization problem is convex, standard iteration complexity guarantees for first-order methods do not directly apply due to the absence of Lipschitz continuity and smoothness in the loss function. In this work, we propose a stochastic first-order algorithm named $B$-sample stochastic dual averaging with the logarithmic barrier. For the Poisson inverse problem, our algorithm attains an $\varepsilon$-optimal solution in $\smash{\tilde{O}}(d^2/\varepsilon^2)$ time, matching the state of the art, where $d$ denotes the dimension. When computing the maximum-likelihood estimate for quantum state tomography, our algorithm yields an $\varepsilon$-optimal solution in $\smash{\tilde{O}}(d^3/\varepsilon^2)$ time. This improves on the time complexities of existing stochastic first-order methods by a factor of $d^{\omega-2}$ and those of batch methods by a factor of $d^2$, where $\omega$ denotes the matrix multiplication exponent. Numerical experiments demonstrate that empirically, our algorithm outperforms existing methods with explicit complexity guarantees.
While quantum state tomography is notoriously hard, most states hold little interest to practically-minded tomographers. Given that states and unitaries appearing in Nature are of bounded gate complexity, it is natural to ask if efficient learning becomes possible. In this work, we prove that to learn a state generated by a quantum circuit with $G$ two-qubit gates to a small trace distance, a sample complexity scaling linearly in $G$ is necessary and sufficient. We also prove that the optimal query complexity to learn a unitary generated by $G$ gates to a small average-case error scales linearly in $G$. While sample-efficient learning can be achieved, we show that under reasonable cryptographic conjectures, the computational complexity for learning states and unitaries of gate complexity $G$ must scale exponentially in $G$. We illustrate how these results establish fundamental limitations on the expressivity of quantum machine learning models and provide new perspectives on no-free-lunch theorems in unitary learning. Together, our results answer how the complexity of learning quantum states and unitaries relate to the complexity of creating these states and unitaries.
Quantum computing has shown considerable promise for compute-intensive tasks in recent years. For instance, classification tasks based on quantum neural networks (QNN) have garnered significant interest from researchers and have been evaluated in various scenarios. However, the majority of quantum classifiers are currently limited to binary classification tasks due to either constrained quantum computing resources or the need for intensive classical post-processing. In this paper, we propose an efficient quantum multi-classifier called MORE, which stands for measurement and correlation based variational quantum multi-classifier. MORE adopts the same variational ansatz as binary classifiers while performing multi-classification by fully utilizing the quantum information of a single readout qubit. To extract the complete information from the readout qubit, we select three observables that form the basis of a two-dimensional Hilbert space. We then use the quantum state tomography technique to reconstruct the readout state from the measurement results. Afterward, we explore the correlation between classes to determine the quantum labels for classes using the variational quantum clustering approach. Next, quantum label-based supervised learning is performed to identify the mapping between the input data and their corresponding quantum labels. Finally, the predicted label is determined by its closest quantum label when using the classifier. We implement this approach using the Qiskit Python library and evaluate it through extensive experiments on both noise-free and noisy quantum systems. Our evaluation results demonstrate that MORE, despite using a simple ansatz and limited quantum resources, achieves advanced performance.
We introduce version 3 of NetKet, the machine learning toolbox for many-body quantum physics. NetKet is built around neural-network quantum states and provides efficient algorithms for their evaluation and optimization. This new version is built on top of JAX, a differentiable programming and accelerated linear algebra framework for the Python programming language. The most significant new feature is the possibility to define arbitrary neural network ans\"atze in pure Python code using the concise notation of machine-learning frameworks, which allows for just-in-time compilation as well as the implicit generation of gradients thanks to automatic differentiation. NetKet 3 also comes with support for GPU and TPU accelerators, advanced support for discrete symmetry groups, chunking to scale up to thousands of degrees of freedom, drivers for quantum dynamics applications, and improved modularity, allowing users to use only parts of the toolbox as a foundation for their own code.
We apply deep-neural-network-based techniques to quantum state classification and reconstruction. We demonstrate high classification accuracies and reconstruction fidelities, even in the presence of noise and with little data. Using optical quantum states as examples, we first demonstrate how convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can successfully classify several types of states distorted by, e.g., additive Gaussian noise or photon loss. We further show that a CNN trained on noisy inputs can learn to identify the most important regions in the data, which potentially can reduce the cost of tomography by guiding adaptive data collection. Secondly, we demonstrate reconstruction of quantum-state density matrices using neural networks that incorporate quantum-physics knowledge. The knowledge is implemented as custom neural-network layers that convert outputs from standard feedforward neural networks to valid descriptions of quantum states. Any standard feed-forward neural-network architecture can be adapted for quantum state tomography (QST) with our method. We present further demonstrations of our proposed [arXiv:2008.03240] QST technique with conditional generative adversarial networks (QST-CGAN). We motivate our choice of a learnable loss function within an adversarial framework by demonstrating that the QST-CGAN outperforms, across a range of scenarios, generative networks trained with standard loss functions. For pure states with additive or convolutional Gaussian noise, the QST-CGAN is able to adapt to the noise and reconstruct the underlying state. The QST-CGAN reconstructs states using up to two orders of magnitude fewer iterative steps than a standard iterative maximum likelihood (iMLE) method. Further, the QST-CGAN can reconstruct both pure and mixed states from two orders of magnitude fewer randomly chosen data points than iMLE.
Quantum state tomography (QST) is a challenging task in intermediate-scale quantum devices. Here, we apply conditional generative adversarial networks (CGANs) to QST. In the CGAN framework, two duelling neural networks, a generator and a discriminator, learn multi-modal models from data. We augment a CGAN with custom neural-network layers that enable conversion of output from any standard neural network into a physical density matrix. To reconstruct the density matrix, the generator and discriminator networks train each other on data using standard gradient-based methods. We demonstrate that our QST-CGAN reconstructs optical quantum states with high fidelity orders of magnitude faster, and from less data, than a standard maximum-likelihood method. We also show that the QST-CGAN can reconstruct a quantum state in a single evaluation of the generator network if it has been pre-trained on similar quantum states.
Projection-free optimization via different variants of the Frank-Wolfe (FW), a.k.a. Conditional Gradient method has become one of the cornerstones in optimization for machine learning since in many cases the linear minimization oracle is much cheaper to implement than projections and some sparsity needs to be preserved. In a number of applications, e.g. Poisson inverse problems or quantum state tomography, the loss is given by a self-concordant (SC) function having unbounded curvature, implying absence of theoretical guarantees for the existing FW methods. We use the theory of SC functions to provide a new adaptive step size for FW methods and prove global convergence rate O(1/k) after k iterations. If the problem admits a stronger local linear minimization oracle, we construct a novel FW method with linear convergence rate for SC functions.