In this paper, we explore an efficient online algorithm for quantum state estimation based on a matrix-exponentiated gradient method previously used in the context of machine learning. The state update is governed by a learning rate that determines how much weight is given to the new measurement results obtained in each step. We show convergence of the running state estimate in probability to the true state for both noiseless and noisy measurements. We find that in the latter case the learning rate has to be chosen adaptively and decreasing to guarantee convergence beyond the noise threshold. As a practical alternative we then propose to use running averages of the measurement statistics and a constant learning rate to overcome the noise problem. The proposed algorithm is numerically compared with batch maximum-likelihood and least-squares estimators. The results show a superior performance of the new algorithm in terms of accuracy and runtime complexity.
In this paper, we explore an efficient online algorithm for quantum state estimation based on a matrix-exponentiated gradient method previously used in the context of machine learning. The state update is governed by a learning rate that determines how much weight is given to the new measurement results obtained in each step. We show convergence of the running state estimate in probability to the true state for both noiseless and noisy measurements. We find that in the latter case the learning rate has to be chosen adaptively and decreasing to guarantee convergence beyond the noise threshold. As a practical alternative we then propose to use running averages of the measurement statistics and a constant learning rate to overcome the noise problem. The proposed algorithm is numerically compared with batch maximum-likelihood and least-squares estimators. The results show a superior performance of the new algorithm in terms of accuracy and runtime complexity.
Abstract Quantum state tomography, which aims to find the best description of a quantum state---the density matrix, is an essential building block in quantum computation and communication. Standard techniques for state tomography are incapable of tracking changing states and often perform poorly in the presence of environmental noise. Although there are different approaches to solve these problems theoretically, experimental demonstrations have so far been sparse. Our approach, matrix-exponentiated gradient tomography, is an online tomography method that allows for state tracking, updates the estimated density matrix dynamically from the very first measurements, is computationally efficient, and converges to a good estimate quickly even with noisy data. The algorithm is controlled via a single parameter, its learning rate, which determines the performance and can be tailored in simulations to the individual experiment. We present an experimental implementation of matrix-exponentiated gradient tomography on a qutrit system encoded in the transverse spatial mode of photons. We investigate the performance of our method on stationary and evolving states, as well as significant environmental noise, and find fidelities of around 95% in all cases.
Quantum state tomography, which aims to find the best description of a quantum state -- the density matrix, is an essential building block in quantum computation and communication. Standard techniques for state tomography are incapable of tracking changing states and often perform poorly in the presence of environmental noise. Although there are different approaches to solve these problems theoretically, experimental demonstrations have so far been sparse. Our approach, matrix-exponentiated gradient tomography, is an online tomography method that allows for state tracking, updates the estimated density matrix dynamically from the very first measurements, is computationally efficient, and converges to a good estimate quickly even with noisy data. The algorithm is controlled via a single parameter, its learning rate, which determines the performance and can be tailored in simulations to the individual experiment. We present an experimental implementation of matrix-exponentiated gradient tomography on a qutrit system encoded in the transverse spatial mode of photons. We investigate the performance of our method on stationary and evolving states, as well as significant environmental noise, and find fidelities of around 95% in all cases.
We initiate the study of online quantum state tomography (QST), where the matrix representation of an unknown quantum state is reconstructed by sequentially performing a batch of measurements and updating the state estimate using only the measurement statistics from the current round. Motivated by recent advances in non-convex optimization algorithms for solving low-rank QST, we propose non-convex mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms to tackle online QST, which leverage the low-rank structure of the unknown quantum state and are well-suited for practical applications. Our main technical contribution is a rigorous convergence analysis of these algorithms. With proper initialization, we demonstrate that the SGD algorithms for online low-rank QST achieve linear convergence both in expectation and with high probability. Our algorithms achieve nearly optimal sample complexity while remaining highly memory-efficient. In particular, their time complexities are better than the state-of-the-art non-convex QST algorithms, in terms of the rank and the logarithm of the dimension of the unknown quantum state.
We study the problem of online learning of quantum states with logarithmic loss, which is a quantum generalization of online portfolio selection and has applications to quantum state tomography, the task of estimating an unknown quantum state from measurement outcomes. We first establish a regret lower bound, showing that the regret rates of Exponential Weights and the algorithm of Tseng et al. (2025) have optimal polynomial dependence on the dimension. Our analysis leads to two further results. First, our lower-bound proof leads to a quantum state tomography algorithm that is sample optimal up to polylogarithmic factors in the sample size. Second, we develop an algorithm for constructing confidence sequences for the mean of a matrix-valued random variable. A numerical experiment shows that the latter algorithm is competitive with existing methods.
Abstract Quantum state tomography, which aims to find the best description of a quantum state—the density matrix, is an essential building block in quantum computation and communication. Standard techniques for state tomography are incapable of tracking changing states and often perform poorly in the presence of environmental noise. Although there are different approaches to solve these problems theoretically, experimental demonstrations have so far been sparse. Our approach, matrix-exponentiated gradient (MEG) tomography, is an online tomography method that allows for state tracking, updates the estimated density matrix dynamically from the very first measurements, is computationally efficient, and converges to a good estimate quickly even with very noisy data. The algorithm is controlled via a single parameter, its learning rate, which determines the performance and can be tailored in simulations to the individual experiment. We present an experimental implementation of MEG tomography on a qutrit system encoded in the transverse spatial mode of photons. We investigate the performance of our method on stationary and evolving states, as well as significant environmental noise, and find fidelities of around 95% in all cases.
Online quantum state learning is a recently proposed problem by Aaronson et al. (2018), where the learner sequentially predicts n-qubit quantum states based on given measurements on states and noisy outcomes. In the previous work, the algorithms are worst-case optimal in general but fail in achieving tighter bounds in certain simpler or more practical cases. In this paper, we develop algorithms to advance the online learning of quantum states. First, we show that Regularized Follow-the-Leader (RFTL) method with Tallis-2 entropy can achieve an O(MT) total loss with perfect hindsight on the first T measurements with maximum rank M. This regret bound depends only on the maximum rank M of measurements rather than the number of qubits, which takes advantage of low-rank measurements. Second, we propose a parameter-free algorithm based on a classical adjusting learning rate schedule that can achieve a regret depending on the loss of best states in hindsight, which takes advantage of low noisy outcomes. Besides these more adaptive bounds, we also show that our RFTL with Tallis-2 entropy algorithm can be implemented efficiently on near-term quantum computing devices, which is not achievable in previous works.