A fundamental problem in statistics and learning theory is to test properties of distributions. We show that quantum computers can solve such problems with significant speed-ups. In particular, we give fast quantum algorithms for testing closeness between unknown distributions, testing independence between two distributions, and estimating the Shannon / von Neumann entropy of distributions. The distributions can be either classical or quantum, however our quantum algorithms require coherent quantum access to a process preparing the samples. Our results build on the recent technique of quantum singular value transformation, combined with more standard tricks such as divide-and-conquer. The presented approach is a natural fit for distributional property testing both in the classical and the quantum case, demonstrating the first speed-ups for testing properties of density operators that can be accessed coherently rather than only via sampling; for classical distributions our algorithms significantly improve the precision dependence of some earlier results.
We explore potential quantum speedups for the fundamental problem of testing the properties of closeness andk-wise uniformity of probability distributions. •Closeness testingis the problem of distinguishing whether twon-dimensional distributions are identical or at least ε-far in ℓ1- or ℓ2-distance. We show that the quantum query complexities for ℓ1- and ℓ2-closeness testing areO(√n/ε) andO(1/ε), respectively, both of which achieve optimal dependence on ε, improving the prior best results of Gilyén and Li (2019). •k-wise uniformity testingis the problem of distinguishing whether a distribution over {0, 1}nis uniform when restricted to anykcoordinates or ε-far from any such distribution. We propose the first quantum algorithm for this problem with query complexityO(√nk/ε), achieving a quadratic speedup over the state-of-the-art classical algorithm with sample complexityO(nk/ε2) by O’Donnell and Zhao (2018). Moreover, whenk= 2 our quantum algorithm outperforms any classical one because of the classical lower bound Ω(n/ε2). All our quantum algorithms are fairly simple and time-efficient, using only basic quantum subroutines such as amplitude estimation.
Suppose one has access to oracles generating samples from two unknown probability distributions p and q on some N-element set. How many samples does one need to test whether the two distributions are close or far from each other in the L1-norm? This and related questions have been extensively studied during the last years in the field of property testing. In the present paper we study quantum algorithms for testing properties of distributions. It is shown that the L1-distance ∥p-q∥1can be estimated with a constant precision using only O(N1/2) queries in the quantum settings, whereas classical computers need Ω(N1-o(1)) queries. We also describe quantum algorithms for testing uniformity and orthogonality with query complexity O(N1/3). The classical query complexity of these problems is known to be Ω(N1/2).
Driven by exploring the power of quantum computation with a limited number of qubits, we present a novel complete characterization for space-bounded quantum computation, which encompasses settings with one-sided error (unitary
coRQL) and two-sided error (
BQL), approached from a quantum state testing perspective: - The first family of natural complete problems for unitary
coRQL, namely space-bounded quantum state certification for trace distance and Hilbert-Schmidt distance; - A new family of natural complete problems for
BQL, namely space-bounded quantum state testing for trace distance, Hilbert-Schmidt distance, and (von Neumann) entropy difference. In the space-bounded quantum state testing problem, we consider two logarithmic-qubit quantum circuits (devices) denoted as
Q0 and
Q1, which prepare quantum states
ρ0 and
ρ1, respectively, with access to their ``source code''. Our goal is to decide whether
ρ0 is
ε1-close to or
ε2-far from
ρ1 with respect to a specified distance-like measure. Interestingly, unlike time-bounded state testing problems, which exhibit computational hardness depending on the chosen distance-like measure, our results reveal that the space-bounded state testing problems, considering all three measures, are computationally as easy as preparing quantum states. Our results primarily build upon a space-efficient variant of the quantum singular value transformation (QSVT) introduced by Gilyén, Su, Low, and Wiebe (STOC 2019), which is of independent interest. Our technique provides a unified approach for designing space-bounded quantum algorithms. Specifically, we show that implementing QSVT for any bounded polynomial that approximates a piecewise-smooth function incurs only a constant overhead in terms of the space required for special forms of the projected unitary encoding.
Several quantum algorithms for linear algebra problems, and in particular quantum machine learning problems, have been “dequantized” in the past few years. These dequantization results typically hold when classical algorithms can access the data via length-squared sampling. This assumption, which is standard in the field of randomized linear algebra, means that for a unit-norm vector
u∈Cn , we can sample from the distribution
pu:{1,…,n}→[0,1] defined as
pu(i)=∣u(i)∣2 for each
i∈{1,…,n} . Since this distribution corresponds to the distribution obtained by measuring the quantum state |
u > in the computational basis, length-squared sampling access gives a reasonable classical analogue to the kind of quantum access considered in many quantum algorithms for linear algebra problems. In this work we investigate how robust these dequantization results are. We introduce the notion of approximate length-squared sampling, where classical algorithms are only able to sample from a distribution close to the ideal distribution in total variation distance. While quantum algorithms are natively robust against small perturbations, current techniques in dequantization are not. Our main technical contribution is showing how many techniques from randomized linear algebra can be adapted to work under this weaker assumption as well. We then use these techniques to show that the recent low-rank dequantization framework by Chia, Gilyén, Li, Lin, Tang and Wang (JACM 2022) and the dequantization framework for sparse matrices by Gharibian and Le Gall (STOC 2022), which are both based on the Quantum Singular Value Transformation, can be generalized to the case of approximate length-squared sampling access to the input. We also apply these results to obtain a robust dequantization of many quantum machine learning algorithms, including quantum algorithms for recommendation systems, supervised clustering and low-rank matrix inversion.
The classical communication complexity of testing closeness of discrete distributions has recently been studied by Andoni, Malkin and Nosatzki (ICALP'19). In this problem, two players each receive
t samples from one distribution over
[n], and the goal is to decide whether their two distributions are equal, or are
ϵ-far apart in the
l1-distance. In the present paper we show that the quantum communication complexity of this problem is
O~(n/(tϵ2)) qubits when the distributions have low
l2-norm, which gives a quadratic improvement over the classical communication complexity obtained by Andoni, Malkin and Nosatzki. We also obtain a matching lower bound by using the pattern matrix method. Let us stress that the samples received by each of the parties are classical, and it is only communication between them that is quantum. Our results thus give one setting where quantum protocols overcome classical protocols for a testing problem with purely classical samples.