We develop a novel connection between discrepancy minimization and (quantum) communication complexity. As an application, we resolve a substantial special case of the Matrix Spencer conjecture. In particular, we show that for every collection of symmetric $n \times n$ matrices $A_1,\ldots,A_n$ with $\|A_i\| \leq 1$ and $\|A_i\|_F \leq n^{1/4}$ there exist signs $x \in \{ \pm 1\}^n$ such that the maximum eigenvalue of $\sum_{i \leq n} x_i A_i$ is at most $O(\sqrt n)$. We give a polynomial-time algorithm based on partial coloring and semidefinite programming to find such $x$. Our techniques open a new avenue to use tools from communication complexity and information theory to study discrepancy. The proof of our main result combines a simple compression scheme for transcripts of repeated (quantum) communication protocols with quantum state purification, the Holevo bound from quantum information, and tools from sketching and dimensionality reduction. Our approach also offers a promising avenue to resolve the Matrix Spencer conjecture completely -- we show it is implied by a natural conjecture in quantum communication complexity.
We show how to translate a subset of RISC-V machine code compiled from a subset of C to quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) models that can be solved by a quantum annealing machine: given a bound $n$, there is input $I$ to a program $P$ such that $P$ runs into a given program state $E$ executing no more than $n$ machine instructions if and only if the QUBO model of $P$ for $n$ evaluates to 0 on $I$. Thus, with more qubits on the machine than variables in the QUBO model, quantum annealing the model reaches 0 (ground) energy in constant time with high probability on some input $I$ that is part of the ground state if and only if $P$ runs into $E$ on $I$ in no more than $n$ instructions. Translation takes $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ time turning a quantum annealer into a polynomial-time symbolic execution engine and bounded model checker, eliminating their path and state explosion problems. Here, we take advantage of the fact that any machine instruction may only increase the size of the program state by $\mathcal{O}(w)$ bits where $w$ is machine word size. Translation time comes down to $\mathcal{O}(n)$ if memory consumption of $P$ is bounded by a constant, establishing a linear (quadratic) upper bound on quantum space, in number of qubits, in terms of algorithmic time (space) in classical computing. The generated QUBO models only have $\mathcal{O}(2^w\cdot n^2)$ solutions out of $\mathcal{O}(2^{n^2})$ choices and only require $\mathcal{O}(wn)$ attempts to find a solution on a quantum machine. The construction motivates a temporal and spatial metric of quantum advantage and provides a non-relativizing argument for $NP\subseteq BQP$ effectively utilizing the optimality of Grover's algorithm. Our prototypical open-source toolchain translates machine code that runs on real RISC-V hardware to models that can be solved by real quantum annealing hardware, as shown in our experiments.
A flexible transform-based tensor product named $\star_{{\rm{QT}}}$-product for $L$th-order ($L\geq 3$) quaternion tensors is proposed. Based on the $\star_{{\rm{QT}}}$-product, we define the corresponding singular value decomposition named TQt-SVD and the rank named TQt-rank of the $L$th-order ($L\geq 3$) quaternion tensor. Furthermore, with orthogonal quaternion transformations, the TQt-SVD can provide the best TQt-rank-$s$ approximation of any $L$th-order ($L\geq 3$) quaternion tensor. In the experiments, we have verified the effectiveness of the proposed TQt-SVD in the application of the best TQt-rank-$s$ approximation for color videos represented by third-order quaternion tensors.
Biometric authentication is one of the promising alternatives to standard password-based authentication offering better usability and security. In this work, we revisit the biometric authentication based on "fuzzy signatures" introduced by Takahashi et al. (ACNS'15, IJIS'19). These are special types of digital signatures where the secret signing key can be a "fuzzy" data such as user's biometrics. Compared to other cryptographically secure biometric authentications as those relying on fuzzy extractors, the fuzzy signature-based scheme provides a more attractive security guarantee. However, despite their potential values, fuzzy signatures have not attracted much attention owing to their theory-oriented presentations in all prior works. For instance, the discussion on the practical feasibility of the assumptions (such as the entropy of user biometrics), which the security of fuzzy signatures hinges on, is completely missing. In this work, we revisit fuzzy signatures and show that we can indeed efficiently and securely implement them in practice. At a high level, our contribution is threefold: (i) we provide a much simpler, more efficient, and direct construction of fuzzy signature compared to prior works; (ii) we establish novel statistical techniques to experimentally evaluate the conditions on biometrics that are required to securely instantiate fuzzy signatures; and (iii) we provide experimental results using a real-world finger-vein dataset to show that finger-veins from a single hand are sufficient to construct efficient and secure fuzzy signatures. Our performance analysis shows that in a practical scenario with 112-bits of security, the size of the signature is 1256 bytes, and the running time for signing/verification is only a few milliseconds.
In 1991, Roth introduced a natural generalization of rank metric codes, namely tensor codes. The latter are defined to be subspaces of $r$-tensors where the ambient space is endowed with the tensor rank as a distance function. In this work, we describe the general class of tensor codes and we study their invariants that correspond to different families of anticodes. In our context, an anticode is a perfect space that has some additional properties. A perfect space is one that is spanned by tensors of rank 1. Our use of the anticode concept is motivated by an interest in capturing structural properties of tensor codes. In particular, we indentify four different classes of tensor anticodes and show how these gives different information on the codes they describe. We also define the generalized tensor binomial moments and the generalized tensor weight distribution of a code and establish a bijection between these invariants. We use the generalized tensor binomial moments to define the concept of an $i$-tensor BMD code, which is an extremal code in relation to an inequality arising from them. Finally, we give MacWilliams identities for generalized tensor binomial moments.
An increasing number of communication and computational schemes with quantum advantages have recently been proposed, which implies that quantum technology has fertile application prospects. However, demonstrating these schemes experimentally continues to be a central challenge because of the difficulty in preparing high-dimensional states or highly entangled states. In this study, we introduce and analyse a quantum coupon collector protocol by employing coherent states and simple linear optical elements, which was successfully demonstrated using realistic experimental equipment. We showed that our protocol can significantly reduce the number of samples needed to learn a specific set compared with the classical limit of the coupon collector problem. We also discuss the potential values and expansions of the quantum coupon collector by constructing a quantum blind box game. The information transmitted by the proposed game also broke the classical limit. These results strongly prove the advantages of quantum mechanics in machine learning and communication complexity.
We consider the problem of training a multi-layer over-parametrized neural networks to minimize the empirical risk induced by a loss function. In the typical setting of over-parametrization, the network width $m$ is much larger than the data dimension $d$ and number of training samples $n$ ($m=\mathrm{poly}(n,d)$), which induces a prohibitive large weight matrix $W\in \mathbb{R}^{m\times m}$ per layer. Naively, one has to pay $O(m^2)$ time to read the weight matrix and evaluate the neural network function in both forward and backward computation. In this work, we show how to reduce the training cost per iteration, specifically, we propose a framework that uses $m^2$ cost only in the initialization phase and achieves a truly subquadratic cost per iteration in terms of $m$, i.e., $m^{2-\Omega(1)}$ per iteration. To obtain this result, we make use of various techniques, including a shifted ReLU-based sparsifier, a lazy low rank maintenance data structure, fast rectangular matrix multiplication, tensor-based sketching techniques and preconditioning.
We revisit the question of characterizing the convergence rate of plug-in estimators of optimal transport costs. It is well known that an empirical measure comprising independent samples from an absolutely continuous distribution on $\mathbb{R}^d$ converges to that distribution at the rate $n^{-1/d}$ in Wasserstein distance, which can be used to prove that plug-in estimators of many optimal transport costs converge at this same rate. However, we show that when the cost is smooth, this analysis is loose: plug-in estimators based on empirical measures converge quadratically faster, at the rate $n^{-2/d}$. As a corollary, we show that the Wasserstein distance between two distributions is significantly easier to estimate when the measures are far apart. We also prove lower bounds, showing not only that our analysis of the plug-in estimator is tight, but also that no other estimator can enjoy significantly faster rates of convergence uniformly over all pairs of measures. Our proofs rely on empirical process theory arguments based on tight control of $L^2$ covering numbers for locally Lipschitz and semi-concave functions. As a byproduct of our proofs, we derive $L^\infty$ estimates on the displacement induced by the optimal coupling between any two measures satisfying suitable moment conditions, for a wide range of cost functions.
It is well known that quantum codes can be constructed by means of classical symplectic dual-containing codes. This paper considers a family of two-generators quasi-cyclic codes and derives sufficient conditions for these codes to be dual-containing. Then, a new method for constructing binary quantum codes is proposed. As an application, we construct 11 binary quantum codes that exceed the beak-known results. Further, another 40 new binary quantum codes are obtained by propagation rules, all of which improve the lower bound on the minimum distance.
We study the graph parameter elimination distance to bounded degree, which was introduced by Bulian and Dawar in their study of the parameterized complexity of the graph isomorphism problem. We prove that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable on planar graphs, that is, there exists an algorithm that given a planar graph $G$ and integers $d$ and $k$ decides in time $f(k,d)\cdot n^c$ for a computable function~$f$ and constant $c$ whether the elimination distance of $G$ to the class of degree $d$ graphs is at most $k$.
In this paper, we study the optimal convergence rate for distributed convex optimization problems in networks. We model the communication restrictions imposed by the network as a set of affine constraints and provide optimal complexity bounds for four different setups, namely: the function $F(\xb) \triangleq \sum_{i=1}^{m}f_i(\xb)$ is strongly convex and smooth, either strongly convex or smooth or just convex. Our results show that Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent on the dual problem can be executed in a distributed manner and obtains the same optimal rates as in the centralized version of the problem (up to constant or logarithmic factors) with an additional cost related to the spectral gap of the interaction matrix. Finally, we discuss some extensions to the proposed setup such as proximal friendly functions, time-varying graphs, improvement of the condition numbers.