We study the practical performance of quantum-inspired algorithms for recommendation systems and linear systems of equations. These algorithms were shown to have an exponential asymptotic speedup compared to previously known classical methods for problems involving low-rank matrices, but with complexity bounds that exhibit a hefty polynomial overhead compared to quantum algorithms. This raised the question of whether these methods were actually useful in practice. We conduct a theoretical analysis aimed at identifying their computational bottlenecks, then implement and benchmark the algorithms on a variety of problems, including applications to portfolio optimization and movie recommendations. On the one hand, our analysis reveals that the performance of these algorithms is better than the theoretical complexity bounds would suggest. On the other hand, their performance as seen in our implementation degrades noticeably as the rank and condition number of the input matrix are increased. Overall, our results indicate that quantum-inspired algorithms can perform well in practice provided that stringent conditions are met: low rank, low condition number, and very large dimension of the input matrix. By contrast, practical datasets are often sparse and high-rank, precisely the type that can be handled by quantum algorithms.
We study the practical performance of quantum-inspired algorithms for recommendation systems and linear systems of equations. These algorithms were shown to have an exponential asymptotic speedup compared to previously known classical methods for problems involving low-rank matrices, but with complexity bounds that exhibit a hefty polynomial overhead compared to quantum algorithms. This raised the question of whether these methods were actually useful in practice. We conduct a theoretical analysis aimed at identifying their computational bottlenecks, then implement and benchmark the algorithms on a variety of problems, including applications to portfolio optimization and movie recommendations. On the one hand, our analysis reveals that the performance of these algorithms is better than the theoretical complexity bounds would suggest. On the other hand, their performance as seen in our implementation degrades noticeably as the rank and condition number of the input matrix are increased. Overall, our results indicate that quantum-inspired algorithms can perform well in practice provided that stringent conditions are met: low rank, low condition number, and very large dimension of the input matrix. By contrast, practical datasets are often sparse and high-rank, precisely the type that can be handled by quantum algorithms.
Motivated by recent progress in quantum technologies and in particular quantum software, research and industrial communities have been trying to discover new applications of quantum algorithms such as quantum optimization and machine learning. Regardless of which hardware platform these novel algorithms operate on, whether it is adiabatic or gate based, from theoretical point of view, they are performing drastically better than their classical counterparts. Two promising areas of quantum algorithms quantum machine learning and quantum optimization. These are based on performing matrix operations using quantum states and operation, in order to speed up data analysis where quantum computing can efficiently work with high dimensional vectors. Motivated by that, quantum inspired algorithms (e.g. for recommendation systems and principal component analysis) are developed to cope with high dimensionality using probabilistic techniques that are inspire from quantum computing. In this paper we review recent progress in the area of quantum inspired algorithms for low rank matrix approximation. We further explore the possibility of using parametrized complexity for such algorithms to refine practical complexity analysis. Finally, we conjecture that quantum inspired algorithms that use low rank approximation and also sample and query technique for input representations are Fixed Parameter Tractable (FPT).
We propose fast and practical quantum-inspired classical algorithms for solving linear systems. Specifically, given sampling and query access to a matrix A∈Rm×n and a vector b∈Rm, we propose classical algorithms that produce a data structure for the solution x∈Rn of the linear system Ax=b with the ability to sample and query its entries. The resulting x satisfies ∥x−A+b∥≤ε∥A+b∥, where ∥⋅∥ is the spectral norm and A+ is the Moore-Penrose inverse of A. Our algorithm has time complexity O(κF4/κε2) in the general case, where κF=∥A∥F∥A+∥ and κ=∥A∥∥A+∥ are condition numbers. Compared to the prior state-of-the-art result [Shao and Montanaro, arXiv:2103.10309v2], our algorithm achieves a polynomial speedup in condition numbers. When A is s-sparse, our algorithm has complexity O(sκlog(1/ε)), matching the quantum lower bound for solving linear systems in κ and 1/ε up to poly-logarithmic factors [Harrow and Kothari]. When A is s-sparse and symmetric positive-definite, our algorithm has complexity O(sκlog(1/ε)). Technically, our main contribution is the application of the heavy ball momentum method to quantum-inspired classical algorithms for solving linear systems, where we propose two new methods with speedups: quantum-inspired Kaczmarz method with momentum and quantum-inspired coordinate descent method with momentum. Their analysis exploits careful decomposition of the momentum transition matrix and the application of novel spectral norm concentration bounds for independent random matrices. Finally, we also conduct numerical experiments for our algorithms on both synthetic and real-world datasets, and the experimental results support our theoretical claims.
Achieving a provable exponential quantum speedup for an important machine learning task has been a central research goal since the seminal HHL quantum algorithm for solving linear systems and the subsequent quantum recommender systems algorithm by Kerenidis and Prakash. These algorithms were initially believed to be strong candidates for exponential speedups, but a lower bound ruling out similar classical improvements remained absent. In breakthrough work by Tang, it was demonstrated that this lack of progress in classical lower bounds was for good reasons. Concretely, she gave a classical counterpart of the quantum recommender systems algorithm, reducing the quantum advantage to a mere polynomial. Her approach is quite general and was named quantum-inspired classical algorithms. Since then, almost all the initially exponential quantum machine learning speedups have been reduced to polynomial via new quantum-inspired classical algorithms. From the current state-of-affairs, it is unclear whether we can hope for exponential quantum speedups for any natural machine learning task. In this work, we present the first such provable exponential separation between quantum and quantum-inspired classical algorithms for the basic problem of solving a linear system when the input matrix is well-conditioned and has sparse rows and columns.
We give a classical analogue to Kerenidis and Prakash’s quantum recommendation system, previously believed to be one of the strongest candidates for provably exponential speedups in quantum machine learning. Our main result is an algorithm that, given an m × n matrix in a data structure supporting certain ℓ2-norm sampling operations, outputs an ℓ2-norm sample from a rank-k approximation of that matrix in time O(poly(k)log(mn)), only polynomially slower than the quantum algorithm. As a consequence, Kerenidis and Prakash’s algorithm does not in fact give an exponential speedup over classical algorithms. Further, under strong input assumptions, the classical recommendation system resulting from our algorithm produces recommendations exponentially faster than previous classical systems, which run in time linear in m and n.
A recent breakthrough by Tang (STOC 2019) showed how to "dequantize" the quantum algorithm for recommendation systems by Kerenidis and Prakash (ITCS 2017). The resulting algorithm, classical but "quantum-inspired", efficiently computes a low-rank approximation of the users' preference matrix. Subsequent works have shown how to construct efficient quantum-inspired algorithms for approximating the pseudo-inverse of a low-rank matrix as well, which can be used to (approximately) solve low-rank linear systems of equations. In the present paper, we pursue this line of research and develop quantum-inspired algorithms for a large class of matrix transformations that are defined via the singular value decomposition of the matrix. In particular, we obtain classical algorithms with complexity polynomially related (in most parameters) to the complexity of the best quantum algorithms for singular value transformation recently developed by Chakraborty, Gilyén and Jeffery (ICALP 2019) and Gilyén, Su, Low and Wiebe (STOC 2019).
This dissertation presents a study of quantum algorithms for problems that can be posed as matrix function tasks. In Chapter 1 we demonstrate a simple unifying framework for implementing of smooth functions of matrices on a quantum computer. This framework captures a variety of problems that can be solved by evaluating properties of some function of a matrix, and we identify speedups over classical algorithms for some problem classes. The analysis combines ideas from the classical theory of function approximation with the quantum algorithmic primitive of implementing linear combinations of unitary operators. In Chapter 2 we continue this study by looking at the role of sparsity of input matrices in constructing efficient quantum algorithms. We show that classically pre-processing an input matrix by spectral sparsification can be profitable for quantum Hamiltonian simulation algorithms, without compromising the simulation error or complexity. Such preprocessing incurs a one time cost linear in the size of the matrix, but can be exploited to exponentially speed up subsequent subroutines such as inversion. In Chapter 3, we give an application of this theory of matrix functions to the problem of estimating the Renyi entropy of an unknown quantum state. We combine matrix function techniques with mixed state quantum computation in the one-clean qubit model, and are able to bound of the expected runtime of our algorithm in terms of the unknown target quantity. In addition to the theme of analysing the complexity of our algorithms, we also identify instances that are of practical relevance, leading us to some problems of machine learning. In Chapter 4 we investigate kernel based learning methods using random features. We work with the QRAM input model suitable for big data, and show how matrix functions and the quantum Fourier transform can be used to devise a quantum algorithm for sampling random features that are optimised for given input data and choice of kernel. We obtain a potential exponential speedup over the best known classical algorithm even without explicit assumptions of sparsity or low rank. Finally in Chapter 5 we consider the technique of beamsearch decoding used in natural language processing. We work in the query model, and show how quantum search with advice can be used to construct a quantum search decoder that can find the optimal parse (which may for instance be a best translation, or text-to-speech transcript) at least quadratically faster than the best known classical algorithms, and obtain super-quadratic speedups in the expected runtime.