We establish a classical heuristic algorithm for exactly computing quantum probability amplitudes. Our algorithm is based on mapping output probability amplitudes of quantum circuits to evaluations of the Tutte polynomial of graphic matroids. The algorithm evaluates the Tutte polynomial recursively using the deletion-contraction property while attempting to exploit structural properties of the matroid. We consider several variations of our algorithm and present experimental results comparing their performance on two classes of random quantum circuits. Further, we obtain an explicit form for Clifford circuit amplitudes in terms of matroid invariants and an alternative efficient classical algorithm for computing the output probability amplitudes of Clifford circuits.
The human mental search (HMS) algorithm is a relatively recent population-based metaheuristic algorithm, which has shown competitive performance in solving complex optimisation problems. It is based on three main operators: mental search, grouping, and movement. In the original HMS algorithm, a clustering algorithm is used to group the current population in order to identify a promising region in search space, while candidate solutions then move towards the best candidate solution in the promising region. In this paper, we propose a novel HMS algorithm, HMS-OS, which is based on clustering in both objective and search space, where clustering in objective space finds a set of best candidate solutions whose centroid is then also used in updating the population. For further improvement, HMSOS benefits from an adaptive selection of the number of mental processes in the mental search operator. Experimental results on CEC-2017 benchmark functions with dimensionalities of 50 and 100, and in comparison to other optimisation algorithms, indicate that HMS-OS yields excellent performance, superior to those of other methods.
A homomorphic secret sharing (HSS) scheme is a secret sharing scheme that supports evaluating functions on shared secrets by means of a local mapping from input shares to output shares. We initiate the study of the download rate of HSS, namely, the achievable ratio between the length of the output shares and the output length when amortized over $\ell$ function evaluations. We obtain the following results. * In the case of linear information-theoretic HSS schemes for degree-$d$ multivariate polynomials, we characterize the optimal download rate in terms of the optimal minimal distance of a linear code with related parameters. We further show that for sufficiently large $\ell$ (polynomial in all problem parameters), the optimal rate can be realized using Shamir's scheme, even with secrets over $\mathbb{F}_2$. * We present a general rate-amplification technique for HSS that improves the download rate at the cost of requiring more shares. As a corollary, we get high-rate variants of computationally secure HSS schemes and efficient private information retrieval protocols from the literature. * We show that, in some cases, one can beat the best download rate of linear HSS by allowing nonlinear output reconstruction and $2^{-\Omega(\ell)}$ error probability.
We present and analyze a cut finite element method for the weak imposition of the Neumann boundary conditions of the Darcy problem. The Raviart-Thomas mixed element on both triangular and quadrilateral meshes is considered. Our method is based on the Nitsche formulation studied in [10.1515/jnma-2021-0042] and can be considered as a first attempt at extension in the unfitted case. The key feature is to add two ghost penalty operators to stabilize both the velocity and pressure fields. We rigorously prove our stabilized formulation to be well-posed and derive a priori error estimates for the velocity and pressure fields. We show that an upper bound for the condition number of the stiffness matrix holds as well. Numerical examples corroborating the theory are included.
We study the power of quantum memory for learning properties of quantum systems and dynamics, which is of great importance in physics and chemistry. Many state-of-the-art learning algorithms require access to an additional external quantum memory. While such a quantum memory is not required a priori, in many cases, algorithms that do not utilize quantum memory require much more data than those which do. We show that this trade-off is inherent in a wide range of learning problems. Our results include the following: (1) We show that to perform shadow tomography on an $n$-qubit state rho with $M$ observables, any algorithm without quantum memory requires $\Omega(\min(M, 2^n))$ samples of rho in the worst case. Up to logarithmic factors, this matches the upper bound of [HKP20] and completely resolves an open question in [Aar18, AR19]. (2) We establish exponential separations between algorithms with and without quantum memory for purity testing, distinguishing scrambling and depolarizing evolutions, as well as uncovering symmetry in physical dynamics. Our separations improve and generalize prior work of [ACQ21] by allowing for a broader class of algorithms without quantum memory. (3) We give the first tradeoff between quantum memory and sample complexity. We prove that to estimate absolute values of all $n$-qubit Pauli observables, algorithms with $k < n$ qubits of quantum memory require at least $\Omega(2^{(n-k)/3})$ samples, but there is an algorithm using $n$-qubit quantum memory which only requires $O(n)$ samples. The separations we show are sufficiently large and could already be evident, for instance, with tens of qubits. This provides a concrete path towards demonstrating real-world advantage for learning algorithms with quantum memory.
We consider the problem of untangling a given (non-planar) straight-line circular drawing $\delta_G$ of an outerplanar graph $G=(V, E)$ into a planar straight-line circular drawing by shifting a minimum number of vertices to a new position on the circle. For an outerplanar graph $G$, it is clear that such a crossing-free circular drawing always exists and we define the circular shifting number shift$(\delta_G)$ as the minimum number of vertices that are required to be shifted in order to resolve all crossings of $\delta_G$. We show that the problem Circular Untangling, asking whether shift$(\delta_G) \le K$ for a given integer $K$, is NP-complete. For $n$-vertex outerplanar graphs, we obtain a tight upper bound of shift$(\delta_G) \le n - \lfloor\sqrt{n-2}\rfloor -2$. Based on these results we study Circular Untangling for almost-planar circular drawings, in which a single edge is involved in all the crossings. In this case, we provide a tight upper bound shift$(\delta_G) \le \lfloor \frac{n}{2} \rfloor-1$ and present a constructive polynomial-time algorithm to compute the circular shifting number of almost-planar drawings.
In this paper, we formulate and solve the intermittent deployment problem, which yields strategies that couple \emph{when} heterogeneous robots should sense an environmental process, with where a deployed team should sense in the environment. As a motivation, suppose that a spatiotemporal process is slowly evolving and must be monitored by a multi-robot team, e.g., unmanned aerial vehicles monitoring pasturelands in a precision agriculture context. In such a case, an intermittent deployment strategy is necessary as persistent deployment or monitoring is not cost-efficient for a slowly evolving process. At the same time, the problem of where to sense once deployed must be solved as process observations yield useful feedback for determining effective future deployment and monitoring decisions. In this context, we model the environmental process to be monitored as a spatiotemporal Gaussian process with mutual information as a criterion to measure our understanding of the environment. To make the sensing resource-efficient, we demonstrate how to use matroid constraints to impose a diverse set of homogeneous and heterogeneous constraints. In addition, to reflect the cost-sensitive nature of real-world applications, we apply budgets on the cost of deployed heterogeneous robot teams. To solve the resulting problem, we exploit the theories of submodular optimization and matroids and present a greedy algorithm with bounds on sub-optimality. Finally, Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate the correctness of the proposed method.
The Quantum Singular Value Transformation (QSVT) is a recent technique that gives a unified framework to describe most quantum algorithms discovered so far, and may lead to the development of novel quantum algorithms. In this paper we investigate the hardness of classically simulating the QSVT. A recent result by Chia, Gily\'en, Li, Lin, Tang and Wang (STOC 2020) showed that the QSVT can be efficiently "dequantized" for low-rank matrices, and discussed its implication to quantum machine learning. In this work, motivated by establishing the superiority of quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry and making progress on the quantum PCP conjecture, we focus on the other main class of matrices considered in applications of the QSVT, sparse matrices. We first show how to efficiently "dequantize", with arbitrarily small constant precision, the QSVT associated with a low-degree polynomial. We apply this technique to design classical algorithms that estimate, with constant precision, the singular values of a sparse matrix. We show in particular that a central computational problem considered by quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry (estimating the ground state energy of a local Hamiltonian when given, as an additional input, a state sufficiently close to the ground state) can be solved efficiently with constant precision on a classical computer. As a complementary result, we prove that with inverse-polynomial precision, the same problem becomes BQP-complete. This gives theoretical evidence for the superiority of quantum algorithms for chemistry, and strongly suggests that said superiority stems from the improved precision achievable in the quantum setting. We also discuss how this dequantization technique may help make progress on the central quantum PCP conjecture.
United Nation (UN) security council has fifteen members, out of which five permanent members of the council can use their veto power against any unfavorable decision taken by the council. In certain situation, a member using right to veto may prefer to remain anonymous. This need leads to the requirement of the protocols for anonymous veto which can be viewed as a special type of voting. Recently, a few protocols for quantum anonymous veto have been designed which clearly show quantum advantages in ensuring anonymity of the veto. However, none of the efficient protocols for quantum anonymous veto have yet been experimentally realized. Here, we implement 2 of those protocols for quantum anonymous veto using an IBM quantum computer named IBMQ Casablanca and different quantum resources like Bell, GHZ and cluster states. In this set of proof-of-principle experiments, it's observed that using the present technology, a protocol for quantum anonymous veto can be realized experimentally if the number of people who can veto remains small as in the case of UN council. Further, it's observed that Bell state based protocol implemented here performs better than the GHZ/cluster state based implementation of the other protocol in an ideal scenario as well as in presence of different types of noise (amplitude damping, phase damping, depolarizing and bit-flip noise). In addition, it's observed that based on diminishing impact on fidelity, different noise models studied here can be ordered in ascending order as phase damping, amplitude damping, depolarizing, bit-flip.
The matrix logarithm is one of the important matrix functions. Recently, a quantum algorithm that computes the state $|f\rangle$ corresponding to matrix-vector product $f(A)b$ is proposed in [Takahira, et al. Quantum algorithm for matrix functions by Cauchy's integral formula, QIC, Vol.20, No.1\&2, pp.14-36, 2020]. However, it can not be applied to matrix logarithm. In this paper, we propose a quantum algorithm, which uses LCU method and block-encoding technique as subroutines, to compute the state $|f\rangle = \log(A)|b\rangle / \|\log(A)|b\rangle\|$ corresponding to $\log(A)b$ via the integral representation of $\log(A)$ and the Gauss-Legendre quadrature rule.
Quantum hardware and quantum-inspired algorithms are becoming increasingly popular for combinatorial optimization. However, these algorithms may require careful hyperparameter tuning for each problem instance. We use a reinforcement learning agent in conjunction with a quantum-inspired algorithm to solve the Ising energy minimization problem, which is equivalent to the Maximum Cut problem. The agent controls the algorithm by tuning one of its parameters with the goal of improving recently seen solutions. We propose a new Rescaled Ranked Reward (R3) method that enables stable single-player version of self-play training that helps the agent to escape local optima. The training on any problem instance can be accelerated by applying transfer learning from an agent trained on randomly generated problems. Our approach allows sampling high-quality solutions to the Ising problem with high probability and outperforms both baseline heuristics and a black-box hyperparameter optimization approach.