We apply the framework of block-encodings, introduced by Low and Chuang (under the name standard-form), to the study of quantum machine learning algorithms and derive general results that are applicable to a variety of input models, including sparse matrix oracles and matrices stored in a data structure. We develop several tools within the block-encoding framework, such as singular value estimation of a block-encoded matrix, and quantum linear system solvers using block-encodings. The presented results give new techniques for Hamiltonian simulation of non-sparse matrices, which could be relevant for certain quantum chemistry applications, and which in turn imply an exponential improvement in the dependence on precision in quantum linear systems solvers for non-sparse matrices. In addition, we develop a technique of variable-time amplitude estimation, based on Ambainis' variable-time amplitude amplification technique, which we are also able to apply within the framework. As applications, we design the following algorithms: (1) a quantum algorithm for the quantum weighted least squares problem, exhibiting a 6-th power improvement in the dependence on the condition number and an exponential improvement in the dependence on the precision over the previous best algorithm of Kerenidis and Prakash; (2) the first quantum algorithm for the quantum generalized least squares problem; and (3) quantum algorithms for estimating electrical-network quantities, including effective resistance and dissipated power, improving upon previous work.
We apply the framework of block-encodings, introduced by Low and Chuang (under the name standard-form), to the study of quantum machine learning algorithms and derive general results that are applicable to a variety of input models, including sparse matrix oracles and matrices stored in a data structure. We develop several tools within the block-encoding framework, such as singular value estimation of a block-encoded matrix, and quantum linear system solvers using block-encodings. The presented results give new techniques for Hamiltonian simulation of non-sparse matrices, which could be relevant for certain quantum chemistry applications, and which in turn imply an exponential improvement in the dependence on precision in quantum linear systems solvers for non-sparse matrices. In addition, we develop a technique of variable-time amplitude estimation, based on Ambainis' variable-time amplitude amplification technique, which we are also able to apply within the framework. As applications, we design the following algorithms: (1) a quantum algorithm for the quantum weighted least squares problem, exhibiting a 6-th power improvement in the dependence on the condition number and an exponential improvement in the dependence on the precision over the previous best algorithm of Kerenidis and Prakash; (2) the first quantum algorithm for the quantum generalized least squares problem; and (3) quantum algorithms for estimating electrical-network quantities, including effective resistance and dissipated power, improving upon previous work.
Linear regression is a widely used technique to fit linear models and finds widespread applications across different areas such as machine learning and statistics. In most real-world scenarios, however, linear regression problems are often ill-posed or the underlying model suffers from o v e r f i t t i n g , leading to erroneous or trivial solutions. This is often dealt with by adding extra constraints, known as regularization. In this paper, we use the frameworks of block-encoding and quantum singular value transformation (QSVT) to design the first quantum algorithms for quantum least squares with general ℓ 2 -regularization. These include regularized versions of quantum ordinary least squares, quantum weighted least squares, and quantum generalized least squares. Our quantum algorithms substantially improve upon prior results on quantum ridge regression (polynomial improvement in the condition number and an exponential improvement in accuracy), which is a particular case of our result.To this end, we assume approximate block-encodings of the underlying matrices as input and use robust QSVT algorithms for various linear algebra operations. In particular, we develop a variable-time quantum algorithm for matrix inversion using QSVT, where we use quantum eigenvalue discrimination as a subroutine instead of gapped phase estimation. This ensures that substantially fewer ancilla qubits are required for this procedure than prior results. Owing to the generality of the block-encoding framework, our algorithms are applicable to a variety of input models and can also be seen as improved and generalized versions of prior results on standard (non-regularized) quantum least squares algorithms.
Most quantum algorithms offering speedups over classical algorithms are based on the three techniques of phase estimation, amplitude estimation and Hamiltonian simulation. In spite of the linear algebraic nature of the postulates of quantum mechanics, until recent work by Lloyd and coauthors cite{LMR13, LMR13a, LMR13b} no quantum algorithms achieving speedups for linear algebra or machine learning had been proposed. A quantum machine learning algorithm must address three issues: encoding of classical data into a succinct quantum representation, processing the quantum representation and extraction of classically useful information from the processed quantum state. In this dissertation, we make progress on all three aspects of the quantum machine learning problem and obtain quantum algorithms for low rank approximation and regularized least squares. The oracle QRAM, the standard model studied in quantum query complexity, requires time O(sqrtn) to encode vectors vinRn into quantum states. We propose simple hardware augmentations to the oracle QRAM, that enable vectors vinRn to be encoded in time O(logn), with pre-processing. The augmented QRAM incurs minimal hardware overheads, the pre-processing can be parallelized and is a flexible model that allows storage of multiple vectors and matrices. It provides a framework for designing quantum algorithms for linear algebra and machine learning. Using the augmented QRAM for vector state preparation, we present two different algorithms for singular value estimation where given singular vector ketv for AinRmtimesn, the singular value sigmai is estimated within additive error epsilonnormAF. The first algorithm requires time wt1/epsilon3 and uses the approach for simulating e−irho in cite{LMR13}. However, the analysis cite{LMR13} does not establish the coherence of outputs, we provide a qualitatively different analysis that uses the quantum Zeno effect to establish coherence and reveals the probabilistic nature of the simulation technique. The second algorithm has a running time wt1/epsilon and uses Jordan's lemma from linear algebra and the augmented QRAM to implement reflections. We use quantum singular value estimation to obtain algorithms for low rank approximation by column selection, the algorithms are based on importance sampling from the leverage score distribution. We obtain quadratic speedups for a large class of linear algebra algorithms that rely on importance sampling from the leverage score distribution including approximate least squares and CX and CUR decompositions. Classical algorithms for these problems require time O(mnlogn+poly(1/epsilon)), the quantum algorithms have running time O(sqrtmpoly(1/epsilon,k,Delta)) where k,Delta are the rank and spectral gap. The running time of the quantum CX decomposition algorithm does not depend on m, it is polynomial in problem parameters. We also provide quantum algorithms for ell2 regularized regression problems, the quantum ridge regression algorithm requires time wt1/mu2delta to output a quantum state that is delta close to the solution, where mu is the regularization parameter.
Most quantum algorithms offering speedups over classical algorithms are based on the three techniques of phase estimation, amplitude estimation and Hamiltonian simulation. In spite of the linear algebraic nature of the postulates of quantum mechanics, until recent work by Lloyd and coauthors cite{LMR13, LMR13a, LMR13b} no quantum algorithms achieving speedups for linear algebra or machine learning had been proposed. A quantum machine learning algorithm must address three issues: encoding of classical data into a succinct quantum representation, processing the quantum representation and extraction of classically useful information from the processed quantum state. In this dissertation, we make progress on all three aspects of the quantum machine learning problem and obtain quantum algorithms for low rank approximation and regularized least squares. The oracle QRAM, the standard model studied in quantum query complexity, requires time O(sqrtn) to encode vectors vinRn into quantum states. We propose simple hardware augmentations to the oracle QRAM, that enable vectors vinRn to be encoded in time O(logn), with pre-processing. The augmented QRAM incurs minimal hardware overheads, the pre-processing can be parallelized and is a flexible model that allows storage of multiple vectors and matrices. It provides a framework for designing quantum algorithms for linear algebra and machine learning. Using the augmented QRAM for vector state preparation, we present two different algorithms for singular value estimation where given singular vector ketv for AinRmtimesn, the singular value sigmai is estimated within additive error epsilonnormAF. The first algorithm requires time wt1/epsilon3 and uses the approach for simulating e−irho in cite{LMR13}. However, the analysis cite{LMR13} does not establish the coherence of outputs, we provide a qualitatively different analysis that uses the quantum Zeno effect to establish coherence and reveals the probabilistic nature of the simulation technique. The second algorithm has a running time wt1/epsilon and uses Jordan's lemma from linear algebra and the augmented QRAM to implement reflections. We use quantum singular value estimation to obtain algorithms for low rank approximation by column selection, the algorithms are based on importance sampling from the leverage score distribution. We obtain quadratic speedups for a large class of linear algebra algorithms that rely on importance sampling from the leverage score distribution including approximate least squares and CX and CUR decompositions. Classical algorithms for these problems require time O(mnlogn+poly(1/epsilon)), the quantum algorithms have running time O(sqrtmpoly(1/epsilon,k,Delta)) where k,Delta are the rank and spectral gap. The running time of the quantum CX decomposition algorithm does not depend on m, it is polynomial in problem parameters. We also provide quantum algorithms for ell2 regularized regression problems, the quantum ridge regression algorithm requires time wt1/mu2delta to output a quantum state that is delta close to the solution, where mu is the regularization parameter.
Quantum Signal Processing (QSP) and Quantum Singular Value Transformation (QSVT) provide an efficient framework for implementing polynomials of block-encoded matrices, and thus offer a systematic approach to quantum algorithm design. However, despite a number of recent advances, important limitations remain. In particular, QSP can only transform unitary matrices, by applying a polynomial to their eigenvalues, while QSVT is a singular-value transformation and thus one can only obtain the polynomial of Hermitian matrices. As a consequence, these techniques do not directly apply to an arbitrary non-Hermitian matrix that is not diagonalizable. In this work, we propose a simple yet powerful method to extend these ideas to arbitrary square matrices by acting on their eigenvalues. To this end, we introduce the notion of an n-regular block encoding, namely, a block encoding whose k-th power reproduces the k-th power of the encoded matrix for every 0<k<n. We show that applying QSP to any unitary with this property is equivalent to applying a polynomial of degree at most n to the block-encoded matrix, independently of its internal structure. Moreover, we provide a simple construction that transforms any block encoding into an n-regular one using only O(logn) ancillary qubits and operations. Finally, we show that this construction induces the desired transformation on the eigenvalues associated with the Jordan normal form of the matrix; for non-diagonalizable matrices this yields the full matrix function P(A), whose action on each Jordan block involves the derivatives of P, and not merely the map λ↦P(λ).
Quantum algorithms manipulate the amplitudes of quantum states to find solutions to computational problems. In this work, we present a framework for applying a general class of non-linear functions to the amplitudes of quantum states, with up-to an exponential improvement over the previous work. Our framework accepts a state preparation unitary (or block-encoding), specified as a quantum circuit, defining an N-dimensional quantum state. We then construct a diagonal block-encoding of the amplitudes of the quantum state, building on and simplifying previous work. Techniques from the QSVT literature are then used to process this block-encoding. The source of our exponential speedup comes from the quantum analog of importance sampling. We then derive new error-bounds relevant for end-to-end applications, giving the error in terms of ℓ2-norm error. We demonstrate the power of this framework with four key applications. First, our algorithm can apply the important function tanh(x) to the amplitudes of an arbitrary quantum state with at most an ℓ2-norm error of ε, with worst-case query complexity of O(log(N/ε)), in comparison to the O(Nlog(N/ε)) of prior work. Second, we present an algorithm solving a new formulation of maximum finding in the unitary input model. Third, we prove efficient end-to-end complexities in applying a number of common non-linear functions to arbitrary quantum states. Finally, we generalize and unify existing quantum arithmetic-free state-preparation techniques. Our work provides an important and efficient algorithmic building block with potentially numerous applications in areas such as optimization, state preparation, quantum chemistry, and machine learning.
Along with the development of quantum technology, finding useful applications of quantum computers has been a central pursuit. Despite various quantum algorithms have been developed, many of them often require strong input assumptions, which is hardware demanding. In particular, recent advances on dequantization have revealed that the quantum advantage is more of a mere artifact of strong input assumptions. In this work, we propose a variant of these algorithms, leveraging both classical and quantum resources. Provided the classical knowledge (the entries) of the matrix/vector of interest, a classical procedure is used to pre-process this information. Then they are fed into a quantum circuit which is shown to be a block encoding of the matrix of interest. From this block-encoding, we show how to use it to tackle a wide range of problems, including principal component analysis, linear equation solving, Hamiltonian simulation, preparing ground state, and data fitting. We also analyze our protocol, showing that both the classical and quantum procedure can achieve logarithmic complexity in the input dimension, thus implying its potential for near term realization. We then discuss several implications and corollaries of our result. First,, our results suggest there are certain matrices/Hamiltonians where our method can provide exponential improvement compared to the existing ones with respect to the sparsity. Regarding dense linear systems, our method achieves exponential speed-up with respect to the inverse of error tolerance, compared to the best previously known quantum algorithm for dense systems. Last, and most importantly, regarding quantum data fitting, we show how the output of our quantum algorithms can be leveraged to predict unseen data. Thus, it provides an end-to-end application, which has been an open aspect of the previous quantum data fitting algorithm.