We construct reversible Boolean circuits efficiently simulating reversible Turing machines. Both the circuits and the simulation proof are rather simple. Then we give a fairly straightforward generalization of the circuits and the simulation proof to the quantum case.
This paper refines the existing axiomatic semantics of digital circuits with delay and feedback, in which circuits are constructed as morphisms in a freely generated cartesian traced (dataflow) category. First, we give a cleaner presentation, making a clearer distinction between syntax and semantics, including a full formalisation of the semantics as stream functions. As part of this effort, we refocus the categorical framework through the lens of string diagrams, which not only makes reading equations more intuitive but removes bureaucracy such as associativity from proofs. We also extend the existing framework with a new axiom, inspired by the Kleene fixed-point theorem, which allows circuits with non-delay-guarded feedback, typically handled poorly by traditional methodologies, to be replaced with a series of finitely iterated circuits. This eliminates the possibility of infinitely unfolding a circuit; instead, one can always reduce a circuit to some (possibly undefined) value. To fully characterise the stream functions that correspond to digital circuits, we examine how the behaviour of the latter can be modelled using Mealy machines. By establishing that the translation between sequential circuits and Mealy machines preserves their behaviour, one can observe that circuits always implement monotone stream functions with finite stream derivatives.
Simulating stiff materials in applications where deformations are either not significant or can safely be ignored is a pivotal task across fields. Rigid body modeling has thus long remained a fundamental tool and is, by far, the most popular simulation strategy currently employed for modeling stiff solids. At the same time, numerical models of a rigid body continue to pose a number of known challenges and trade-offs including intersections, instabilities, inaccuracies, and/or slow performances that grow with contact-problem complexity. In this paper we revisit this problem and present ABD, a simple and highly effective affine body dynamics framework, which significantly improves state-of-the-art stiff simulations. We trace the challenges in the rigid-body IPC (incremental potential contact) method to the necessity of linearizing piecewise-rigid (SE(3)) trajectories and subsequent constraints. ABD instead relaxes the unnecessary (and unrealistic) constraint that each body's motion be exactly rigid with a stiff orthogonality potential, while preserving the rigid body model's key feature of a small coordinate representation. In doing so ABD replaces piecewise linearization with piecewise linear trajectories. This, in turn, combines the best from both parties: compact coordinates ensure small, sparse system solves, while piecewise-linear trajectories enable efficient and accurate constraint (contact and joint) evaluations. Beginning with this simple foundation, ABD preserves all guarantees of the underlying IPC model e.g., solution convergence, guaranteed non-intersection, and accurate frictional contact. Over a wide range and scale of simulation problems we demonstrate that ABD brings orders of magnitude performance gains (two- to three-order on the CPU and an order more utilizing the GPU, which is 10,000x speedups) over prior IPC-based methods with a similar or higher simulation quality.
Molecular robotics is challenging, so it seems best to keep it simple. We consider an abstract molecular robotics model based on simple folding instructions that execute asynchronously. Turning Machines are a simple 1D to 2D folding model, also easily generalisable to 2D to 3D folding. A Turning Machine starts out as a line of connected monomers in the discrete plane, each with an associated turning number. A monomer turns relative to its neighbours, executing a unit-distance translation that drags other monomers along with it, and through collective motion the initial set of monomers eventually folds into a programmed shape. We provide a suite of tools for reasoning about Turning Machines by fully characterising their ability to execute line rotations: executing an almost-full line rotation of $5\pi/3$ radians is possible, yet a full $2\pi$ rotation is impossible. Furthermore, line rotations up to $5\pi/3$ are executed efficiently, in $O(\log n)$ expected time in our continuous time Markov chain time model. We then show that such line-rotations represent a fundamental primitive in the model, by using them to efficiently and asynchronously fold shapes. In particular, arbitrarily large zig-zag-rastered squares and zig-zag paths are foldable, as are $y$-monotone shapes albeit with error (bounded by perimeter length). Finally, we give shapes that despite having paths that traverse all their points, are in fact impossible to fold, as well as techniques for folding certain classes of (scaled) shapes without error. Our approach relies on careful geometric-based analyses of the feats possible and impossible by a very simple robotic system, and pushes conceptional hardness towards mathematical analysis and away from molecular implementation.
The decision time of an infinite time algorithm is the supremum of its halting times over all real inputs. The decision time of a set of reals is the least decision time of an algorithm that decides the set; semidecision times of semidecidable sets are defined similary. It is not hard to see that $\omega_1$ is the maximal decision time of sets of reals. Our main results determine the supremum of countable decision times as $\sigma$ and that of countable semidecision times as $\tau$, where $\sigma$ and $\tau$ denote the suprema of $\Sigma_1$- and $\Sigma_2$-definable ordinals, respectively, over $L_{\omega_1}$. We further compute analogous suprema for singletons.
We propose a series of data-centric heuristics for improving the performance of machine learning systems when applied to problems in quantum information science. In particular, we consider how systematic engineering of training sets can significantly enhance the accuracy of pre-trained neural networks used for quantum state reconstruction without altering the underlying architecture. We find that it is not always optimal to engineer training sets to exactly match the expected distribution of a target scenario, and instead, performance can be further improved by biasing the training set to be slightly more mixed than the target. This is due to the heterogeneity in the number of free variables required to describe states of different purity, and as a result, overall accuracy of the network improves when training sets of a fixed size focus on states with the least constrained free variables. For further clarity, we also include a "toy model" demonstration of how spurious correlations can inadvertently enter synthetic data sets used for training, how the performance of systems trained with these correlations can degrade dramatically, and how the inclusion of even relatively few counterexamples can effectively remedy such problems.
Computing in-memory (CiM) has emerged as an attractive technique to mitigate the von-Neumann bottleneck. Current digital CiM approaches for in-memory operands are based on multi-wordline assertion for computing bit-wise Boolean functions and arithmetic functions such as addition. However, most of these techniques, due to the many-to-one mapping of input vectors to bitline voltages, are limited to CiM of commutative functions, leaving out an important class of computations such as subtraction. In this paper, we propose a CiM approach, which solves the mapping problem through an asymmetric wordline biasing scheme, enabling (a) simultaneous single-cycle memory read and CiM of primitive Boolean functions (b) computation of any Boolean function and (c) CiM of non-commutative functions such as subtraction and comparison. While the proposed technique is technology-agnostic, we show its utility for ferroelectric transistor (FeFET)-based non-volatile memory. Compared to the standard near-memory methods (which require two full memory accesses per operation), we show that our method can achieve a full scale two-operand digital CiM using just one memory access, leading to a 23.2% - 72.6% decrease in energy-delay product (EDP).
We consider the problem of finding a near ground state of a $p$-spin model with Rademacher couplings by means of a low-depth circuit. As a direct extension of the authors' recent work [Gamarnik, Jagannath, Wein 2020], we establish that any poly-size $n$-output circuit that produces a spin assignment with objective value within a certain constant factor of optimality, must have depth at least $\log n/(2\log\log n)$ as $n$ grows. This is stronger than the known state of the art bounds of the form $\Omega(\log n/(k(n)\log\log n))$ for similar combinatorial optimization problems, where $k(n)$ depends on the optimality value. For example, for the largest clique problem $k(n)$ corresponds to the square of the size of the clique [Rossman 2010]. At the same time our results are not quite comparable since in our case the circuits are required to produce a solution itself rather than solving the associated decision problem. As in our earlier work, the approach is based on the overlap gap property (OGP) exhibited by random $p$-spin models, but the derivation of the circuit lower bound relies further on standard facts from Fourier analysis on the Boolean cube, in particular the Linial-Mansour-Nisan Theorem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first instance when methods from spin glass theory have ramifications for circuit complexity.
Defining and accurately measuring generalization in generative models remains an ongoing challenge and a topic of active research within the machine learning community. This is in contrast to discriminative models, where there is a clear definition of generalization, i.e., the model's classification accuracy when faced with unseen data. In this work, we construct a simple and unambiguous approach to evaluate the generalization capabilities of generative models. Using the sample-based generalization metrics proposed here, any generative model, from state-of-the-art classical generative models such as GANs to quantum models such as Quantum Circuit Born Machines, can be evaluated on the same ground on a concrete well-defined framework. In contrast to other sample-based metrics for probing generalization, we leverage constrained optimization problems (e.g., cardinality constrained problems) and use these discrete datasets to define specific metrics capable of unambiguously measuring the quality of the samples and the model's generalization capabilities for generating data beyond the training set but still within the valid solution space. Additionally, our metrics can diagnose trainability issues such as mode collapse and overfitting, as we illustrate when comparing GANs to quantum-inspired models built out of tensor networks. Our simulation results show that our quantum-inspired models have up to a $68 \times$ enhancement in generating unseen unique and valid samples compared to GANs, and a ratio of 61:2 for generating samples with better quality than those observed in the training set. We foresee these metrics as valuable tools for rigorously defining practical quantum advantage in the domain of generative modeling.
Machine translation systems require semantic knowledge and grammatical understanding. Neural machine translation (NMT) systems often assume this information is captured by an attention mechanism and a decoder that ensures fluency. Recent work has shown that incorporating explicit syntax alleviates the burden of modeling both types of knowledge. However, requiring parses is expensive and does not explore the question of what syntax a model needs during translation. To address both of these issues we introduce a model that simultaneously translates while inducing dependency trees. In this way, we leverage the benefits of structure while investigating what syntax NMT must induce to maximize performance. We show that our dependency trees are 1. language pair dependent and 2. improve translation quality.
Quantum machine learning is expected to be one of the first potential general-purpose applications of near-term quantum devices. A major recent breakthrough in classical machine learning is the notion of generative adversarial training, where the gradients of a discriminator model are used to train a separate generative model. In this work and a companion paper, we extend adversarial training to the quantum domain and show how to construct generative adversarial networks using quantum circuits. Furthermore, we also show how to compute gradients -- a key element in generative adversarial network training -- using another quantum circuit. We give an example of a simple practical circuit ansatz to parametrize quantum machine learning models and perform a simple numerical experiment to demonstrate that quantum generative adversarial networks can be trained successfully.