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arXiv:2302.02870 · Leibniz international proceedings in informatics

Noisy Decoding by Shallow Circuits with Parities: Classical and Quantum (Extended Abstract)

Jop Briët, Harry Buhrman, Davi Castro-Silva, Niels M. P. Neumann

Published Feb 6, 2023• 3 citations
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Abstract

We consider the problem of decoding corrupted error correcting codes with NC$^0[\oplus]$ circuits in the classical and quantum settings. We show that any such classical circuit can correctly recover only a vanishingly small fraction of messages, if the codewords are sent over a noisy channel with positive error rate. Previously this was known only for linear codes with large dual distance, whereas our result applies to any code. By contrast, we give a simple quantum circuit that correctly decodes the Hadamard code with probability $Ω(\varepsilon^2)$ even if a $(1/2 - \varepsilon)$-fraction of a codeword is adversarially corrupted. Our classical hardness result is based on an equidistribution phenomenon for multivariate polynomials over a finite field under biased input-distributions. This is proved using a structure-versus-randomness strategy based on a new notion of rank for high-dimensional polynomial maps that may be of independent interest. Our quantum circuit is inspired by a non-local version of the Bernstein-Vazirani problem, a technique to generate ``poor man's cat states'' by Watts et al., and a constant-depth quantum circuit for the OR function by Takahashi and Tani.

DOI
10.4230/lipics.itcs.2024.21

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We prove a fault-tolerance theorem for quantum computation against adversarial noise. For every quantum circuit on Nˉ\bar{N}Nˉ logical qudits of depth Tˉ\bar{T}Tˉ, we construct a fault-tolerant circuit on N=poly(Nˉ)N=\text{poly}(\bar{N})N=poly(Nˉ) physical qudits of depth Tˉ⋅Nˉo(1)\bar{T}\cdot\bar{N}^{o(1)}Tˉ⋅Nˉo(1), which is robust against an adversary who may arbitrarily choose and corrupt an almost-linear number N1−o(1)N^{1-o(1)}N1−o(1) of physical qudits at each time step. This robustness significantly improves upon prior fault-tolerance theorems, which assumed corruptions were either local and stochastic, or else only act on a polynomially vanishing fraction of qudits. Our fault-tolerance scheme addresses a key bottleneck towards constructing quantum PCPs via the circuit-to-Hamiltonian mapping of Anshu, Breuckmann, and Nguyen (STOC'24). More fundamentally, our result demonstrates that fault-tolerant quantum computation remains possible under noise models that are global, worst-case, and non-Markovian over the full duration of the computation, directly countering concerns that correlated noise could fundamentally undermine quantum fault tolerance. Our construction is based on a new family of subsystem product codes we develop, which have large dimension and distance along with low-weight parity-checks, and which support transversal non-Clifford gates. We show how to perform single-shot fault-tolerant error correction on these codes using a Floquet-like procedure based on the local testability of classical tensor codes. We then obtain a universal fault-tolerance scheme using repeated code switching in a hypercubic qudit architecture. Finally, we recursively compose our scheme with itself to reduce an initially exponential qudit dimension down to a constant.
Recent works by Bravyi, Gosset and Konig (Science 2018), Bene Watts et al. (STOC 2019), Coudron, Stark and Vidick (QIP 2019) and Le Gall (CCC 2019) have shown unconditional separations between the computational powers of shallow (i.e., small-depth) quantum and classical circuits: quantum circuits can solve in constant depth computational problems that require logarithmic depth to solve with classical circuits. Using quantum error correction, Bravyi, Gosset, Konig and Tomamichel (Nature Physics 2020) further proved that a similar separation still persists even if quantum circuits are subject to local stochastic noise. We prove that this quantum advantage persists even if the quantum circuits can be subject to arbitrary corruption: in this paper we assume that any constant fraction of the qubits (for instance, huge blocks of qubits) may be arbitrarily corrupted at the end of the computation. We show that even in this model, quantum circuits can still solve in constant depth computational problems that require logarithmic depth to solve with bounded fan-in classical circuits. This gives another compelling evidence of the computational power of quantum shallow circuits. In order to show our result, we consider the Graph State Sampling problem (which was also used in prior works) on expander graphs. We exploit the robustness of expander graphs against vertex corruption to show that a subproblem hard for small-depth classical circuits can still be extracted from the output of the corrupted quantum circuit.
We consider the quantum decoding problem. It consists in recovering a codeword given a superposition of noisy versions of this codeword. By measuring the superposition, we get back to the classical decoding problem. It appears for the first time in Chen, Liu and Zhandry’s work showing a quantum advantage for the Short Integer Solution (SIS) problem for thel∞norm. In a recent paper, Chailloux and Tillich proved that when we have a noise following a Bernoulli distribution, the quantum decoding problem can be solved in polynomial time and is therefore easier than classical decoding for which the best known algorithms have an exponential complexity. They also give an information theoretic limit for the code rate at which this problem can be solved which turns out to be above the Shannon limit. In this paper, we generalize the last result to all memoryless noise models. We also show similar results in the rank metric case which corresponds to a noise model which is not memoryless. We analyze the Pretty Good Measurement, from which we derive an information theoretic limit for this problem. By using the algorithm for the quantum decoding problem together with Regev’s reduction, we derive a quantum algorithm sampling codewords from the dual code according to a probability distribution which is the dual of the original noise. It turns out that at the information theoretic limit, we get the most likely nonzero codeword of the dual code. When the distribution is a decreasing function of the weight, we find minimal nonzero codewords. Note that Regev’s reduction used together with classical decoding is much less satisfying since it is not able to output those minimum weight codewords.
Prior work has shown that there exists a relation problem which can be solved with certainty by a constant-depth quantum circuit composed of geometrically local gates in two dimensions, but cannot be solved with high probability by any classical constant depth circuit composed of bounded fan-in gates. Here we provide two extensions of this result. Firstly, we show that a separation in computational power persists even when the constant-depth quantum circuit is restricted to geometrically local gates in one dimension. The corresponding quantum algorithm is the simplest we know of which achieves a quantum advantage of this type. Our second, main result, is that a separation persists even if the shallow quantum circuit is corrupted by noise. We construct a relation problem which can be solved with near certainty using a noisy constant-depth quantum circuit composed of geometrically local gates in three dimensions, provided the noise rate is below a certain constant threshold value. On the other hand, the problem cannot be solved with high probability by a noise-free classical circuit of constant depth. A key component of the proof is a quantum error-correcting code which admits constant-depth logical Clifford gates and single-shot logical state preparation. We show that the surface code meets these criteria.
The existence of quantum locally generated codes is a long standing open problem in quantum information theory. In this thesis, we consider a bound concerning this conjecture as well as a few constructions with codes that are `barely non-local'. We establish a complementary result to Bravyi and Terhal, and show quantum codes which are ``strongly'' not embeddable into finite dimensional lattices must also have poor distance. Along the way we derive some results concerning "pseudorandom" classical codes.\nGiven that quantum codes seem to be difficult to construct, it seems useful to examine "bad" quantum codes for applications in information and communication. Indeed, most of the work in quantum error correction by researchers today is in this direction. We construct a "nearly local" quantum erasure code which can achieve the capacity of the quantum erasure channel. This code has very poor (adversarial) distance, but still manages to correct random erasure errors with high probability. The codes use random Erdos-Renyi graphs to construct quantum states which are nearly local, but also highly entangled across fixed cuts with high probability. We derive some new results concerning classical codes with log-sparse parity check matrices which may be of independent interest.\nInspired by this construction, we are able to construct new approximate unitary 2-designs or "scramblers". The study of scrambling is the study of the mixing properties of different distributions of random unitaries. There is an inherent duality between the study of scrambling and the study of error correction: A good quantum code will make a good scrambler and vice versa. We study the scrambling properties of our random Erdos-Renyi graph state encoding circuits. We are able to show that these circuits, when supplemented by some local "Expander Graph" quantum circuits, form approximate unitary 2-designs. This construction, strictly speaking, does not achieve more efficient parameters than existing approximate 2-designs, but might have implementation advantages over other designs and points to a conjecture which could yield approximate unitary designs with time independent qubit-to-qubit coupling. This would be an extremely interesting construction in the context of experimental randomized benchmarking.