In the oracle identification problem we have oracle access to bits of an unknown string $x$ of length $n$, with the promise that it belongs to a known set $C\subseteq\{0,1\}^n$. The goal is to identify $x$ using as few queries to the oracle as possible. We develop a quantum query algorithm for this problem with query complexity $O\left(\sqrt{\frac{n\log M }{\log(n/\log M)+1}}\right)$, where $M$ is the size of $C$. This bound is already derived by Kothari in 2014, for which we provide a more elegant simpler proof.
In 1973, Lemmens and Seidel posed the problem of determining $N_\alpha(r)$, the maximum number of equiangular lines in $\mathbb{R}^r$ with common angle $\arccos(\alpha)$. Recently, this question has been almost completely settled in the case where $r$ is large relative to $1/\alpha$, with the approach relying on Ramsey's theorem. In this paper, we use orthogonal projections of matrices with respect to the Frobenius inner product in order to overcome this limitation, thereby obtaining upper bounds on $N_{\alpha}(r)$ which significantly improve on the only previously known universal bound of Glazyrin and Yu, as well as taking an important step towards determining $N_\alpha(r)$ exactly for all $r, \alpha$. In particular, our results imply that $N_\alpha(r) = \Theta(r)$ for $\alpha \geq \Omega(1/r^{1/5})$. Our arguments rely on a new geometric inequality for equiangular lines in $\mathbb{R}^r$ which is tight when the number of lines meets the absolute bound $\binom{r+1}{2}$. Moreover, using the connection to graphs, we obtain lower bounds on the second eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix of a regular graph which are tight for strongly regular graphs corresponding to $\binom{r+1}{2}$ equiangular lines in $\mathbb{R}^r$. Our results only require that the spectral gap is less than half the number of vertices and can therefore be seen as an extension of the Alon-Boppana theorem to dense graphs. Generalizing to $\mathbb{C}$, we also obtain the first universal bound on the maximum number of complex equiangular lines in $\mathbb{C}^r$ with common Hermitian angle $\arccos(\alpha)$. In particular, we prove an inequality for complex equiangular lines in $\mathbb{C}^r$ which is tight if the number of lines meets the absolute bound $r^2$ and may be of independent interest in quantum theory. Additionally, we use our projection method to obtain an improvement to Welch's bound.
An $s{\operatorname{-}}t$ minimum cut in a graph corresponds to a minimum weight subset of edges whose removal disconnects vertices $s$ and $t$. Finding such a cut is a classic problem that is dual to that of finding a maximum flow from $s$ to $t$. In this work we describe a quantum algorithm for the minimum $s{\operatorname{-}}t$ cut problem on undirected graphs. For an undirected graph with $n$ vertices, $m$ edges, and integral edge weights bounded by $W$, the algorithm computes with high probability the weight of a minimum $s{\operatorname{-}}t$ cut in time $\widetilde O(\sqrt{m} n^{5/6} W^{1/3} + n^{5/3} W^{2/3})$, given adjacency list access to $G$. For simple graphs this bound is always $\widetilde O(n^{11/6})$, even in the dense case when $m = \Omega(n^2)$. In contrast, a randomized algorithm must make $\Omega(m)$ queries to the adjacency list of a simple graph $G$ even to decide whether $s$ and $t$ are connected.
The partition function and free energy of a quantum many-body system determine its physical properties in thermal equilibrium. Here we study the computational complexity of approximating these quantities for $n$-qubit local Hamiltonians. First, we report a classical algorithm with $\mathrm{poly}(n)$ runtime which approximates the free energy of a given $2$-local Hamiltonian provided that it satisfies a certain denseness condition. Our algorithm combines the variational characterization of the free energy and convex relaxation methods. It contributes to a body of work on efficient approximation algorithms for dense instances of optimization problems which are hard in the general case, and can be viewed as simultaneously extending existing algorithms for (a) the ground energy of dense $2$-local Hamiltonians, and (b) the free energy of dense classical Ising models. Secondly, we establish polynomial-time equivalence between the problem of approximating the free energy of local Hamiltonians and three other natural quantum approximate counting problems, including the problem of approximating the number of witness states accepted by a QMA verifier. These results suggest that simulation of quantum many-body systems in thermal equilibrium may precisely capture the complexity of a broad family of computational problems that has yet to be defined or characterized in terms of known complexity classes. Finally, we summarize state-of-the-art classical and quantum algorithms for approximating the free energy and show how to improve their runtime and memory footprint.
We consider the problem of approximating the arboricity of a graph $G= (V,E)$, which we denote by $\mathsf{arb}(G)$, in sublinear time, where the arboricity of a graph is the minimal number of forests required to cover its edges. An algorithm for this problem may perform degree and neighbor queries, and is allowed a small error probability. We design an algorithm that outputs an estimate $\hat{\alpha}$, such that with probability $1-1/\textrm{poly}(n)$, $\mathsf{arb}(G)/c\log^2 n \leq \hat{\alpha} \leq \mathsf{arb}(G)$, where $n=|V|$ and $c$ is a constant. The expected query complexity and running time of the algorithm are $O(n/\mathsf{arb}(G))\cdot \textrm{poly}(\log n)$, and this upper bound also holds with high probability. %($\widetilde{O}(\cdot)$ is used to suppress $\textrm{poly}(\log n)$ dependencies). This bound is optimal for such an approximation up to a $\textrm{poly}(\log n)$ factor.
We revisit the problem of finding optimal strategies for deterministic Markov Decision Processes (DMDPs), and a closely related problem of testing feasibility of systems of $m$ linear inequalities on $n$ real variables with at most two variables per inequality (2VPI). We give a randomized trade-off algorithm solving both problems and running in $\tilde{O}(nmh+(n/h)^3)$ time using $\tilde{O}(n^2/h+m)$ space for any parameter $h\in [1,n]$. In particular, using subquadratic space we get $\tilde{O}(nm+n^{3/2}m^{3/4})$ running time, which improves by a polynomial factor upon all the known upper bounds for non-dense instances with $m=O(n^{2-\epsilon})$. Moreover, using linear space we match the randomized $\tilde{O}(nm+n^3)$ time bound of Cohen and Megiddo [SICOMP'94] that required $\tilde{\Theta}(n^2+m)$ space. Additionally, we show a new algorithm for the Discounted All-Pairs Shortest Paths problem, introduced by Madani et al. [TALG'10], that extends the DMDPs with optional end vertices. For the case of uniform discount factors, we give a deterministic algorithm running in $\tilde{O}(n^{3/2}m^{3/4})$ time, which improves significantly upon the randomized bound $\tilde{O}(n^2\sqrt{m})$ of Madani et al.
Minimizing a sum of simple submodular functions of limited support is a special case of general submodular function minimization that has seen numerous applications in machine learning. We develop fast techniques for instances where components in the sum are cardinality-based, meaning they depend only on the size of the input set. This variant is one of the most widely applied in practice, encompassing, e.g., common energy functions arising in image segmentation and recent generalized hypergraph cut functions. We develop the first approximation algorithms for this problem, where the approximations can be quickly computed via reduction to a sparse graph cut problem, with graph sparsity controlled by the desired approximation factor. Our method relies on a new connection between sparse graph reduction techniques and piecewise linear approximations to concave functions. Our sparse reduction technique leads to significant improvements in theoretical runtimes, as well as substantial practical gains in problems ranging from benchmark image segmentation tasks to hypergraph clustering problems.
The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) finds approximate solutions to combinatorial optimization problems. Its performance monotonically improves with its depth $p$. We apply the QAOA to MaxCut on large-girth $D$-regular graphs. We give an iterative formula to evaluate performance for any $D$ at any depth $p$. Looking at random $D$-regular graphs, at optimal parameters and as $D$ goes to infinity, we find that the $p=11$ QAOA beats all classical algorithms (known to the authors) that are free of unproven conjectures. While the iterative formula for these $D$-regular graphs is derived by looking at a single tree subgraph, we prove that it also gives the ensemble-averaged performance of the QAOA on the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model. Our iteration is a compact procedure, but its computational complexity grows as $O(p^2 4^p)$. This iteration is more efficient than the previous procedure for analyzing QAOA performance on the SK model, and we are able to numerically go to $p=20$. Encouraged by our findings, we make the optimistic conjecture that the QAOA, as $p$ goes to infinity, will achieve the Parisi value. We analyze the performance of the quantum algorithm, but one needs to run it on a quantum computer to produce a string with the guaranteed performance.
Backtracking is an inexact line search procedure that selects the first value in a sequence $x_0, x_0\beta, x_0\beta^2...$ that satisfies $g(x)\leq 0$ on $\mathbb{R}_+$ with $g(x)\leq 0$ iff $x\leq x^*$. This procedure is widely used in descent direction optimization algorithms with Armijo-type conditions. It both returns an estimate in $(\beta x^*,x^*]$ and enjoys an upper-bound $\lceil \log_{\beta} \epsilon/x_0 \rceil$ on the number of function evaluations to terminate, with $\epsilon$ a lower bound on $x^*$. The basic bracketing mechanism employed in several root-searching methods is adapted here for the purpose of performing inexact line searches, leading to a new class of inexact line search procedures. The traditional bisection algorithm for root-searching is transposed into a very simple method that completes the same inexact line search in at most $\lceil \log_2 \log_{\beta} \epsilon/x_0 \rceil$ function evaluations. A recent bracketing algorithm for root-searching which presents both minmax function evaluation cost (as the bisection algorithm) and superlinear convergence is also transposed, asymptotically requiring $\sim \log \log \log \epsilon/x_0 $ function evaluations for sufficiently smooth functions. Other bracketing algorithms for root-searching can be adapted in the same way. Numerical experiments suggest time savings of 50\% to 80\% in each call to the inexact search procedure.
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.
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.