Fourier analysis on the discrete hypercubes $\{-1,1\}^n$ has found numerous applications in learning theory. A recent breakthrough involves the use of a classical result from Fourier analysis, the Bohnenblust--Hille inequality, in the context of learning low-degree Boolean functions. In these lecture notes, we explore this line of research and discuss recent progress in discrete quantum systems and classical Fourier analysis.
Fourier analysis on the discrete hypercubes {−1,1}n has found numerous applications in learning theory. A recent breakthrough involves the use of a classical result from Fourier analysis, the Bohnenblust--Hille inequality, in the context of learning low-degree Boolean functions. In these lecture notes, we explore this line of research and discuss recent progress in discrete quantum systems and classical Fourier analysis.
Bohnenblust-Hille inequalities for Boolean cubes have been proven with dimension-free constants that grow subexponentially in the degree (Defant et al. in Math Ann 374(1):653-680, 2019). Such inequalities have found great applications in learning low-degree Boolean functions (Eskenazis and Ivanisvili in Proceedings of the 54th annual ACM SIGACT symposium on theory of computing, pp 203-207, 2022). Motivated by learning quantum observables, a qubit analogue of Bohnenblust-Hille inequality for Boolean cubes was recently conjectured in Rouzé et al. (Quantum Talagrand, KKL and Friedgut's theorems and the learnability of quantum Boolean functions, 2022. arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.07279). The conjecture was resolved in Huang et al. (Learning to predict arbitrary quantum processes, 2022. arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.14894). In this paper, we give a new proof of these Bohnenblust-Hille inequalities for qubit system with constants that are dimension-free and of exponential growth in the degree. As a consequence, we obtain a junta theorem for low-degree polynomials. Using similar ideas, we also study learning problems of low degree quantum observables and Bohr's radius phenomenon on quantum Boolean cubes.
In this thesis, Quantum computing, norms, and polynomials, we investigate the interplay between quantum mechanics, complexity theory, and functional analysis, three central areas of physics, computer science, and mathematics, respectively. The unifying theme throughout the thesis is the dynamic exchange between quantum computing and functional analysis: we explore new applications of functional inequalities in quantum computing, and, in the process, establish novel results in functional analysis itself. In the first part, we study quantum query algorithms through their correspondence with completely bounded polynomials, as established in earlier work. We begin by revisiting this correspondence, extending it, and presenting it in a new form. Building on this foundation, we draw an analogy between quantum query algorithms and the Grothendieck inequality. Finally, we conclude this part by employing completely bounded polynomials to solve a special case of one of the main open problems in quantum query complexity, the Aaronson–Ambainis conjecture. In the second part, we turn to quantum learning theory, which seeks to determine how much information must be extracted from a quantum system to fully characterize it. We begin by applying existing versions of the Bohnenblust–Hille inequalities and deriving new ones to obtain results in the learning of low-degree quantum objects. We conclude by presenting some of the first results in the emerging area of Hamiltonian testing and learning. We also include a third part, as a bonus, where we gather three new proofs, that we find elegant and concise, of known results related to the analysis of Boolean functions.
Recent efforts in Analysis of Boolean Functions aim to extend core results to new spaces, including to the slice (k[n]), the hypergrid [K]n, and noncommutative spaces (matrix algebras). We present here a new way to relate functions on the hypergrid (or products of cyclic groups) to their harmonic extensions over the polytorus. We show the supremum of a function f over products of the cyclic group {exp(2πik/K)}k=1K controls the supremum of f over the entire polytorus ({z∈C:∣z∣=1}n), with multiplicative constant C depending on K and deg(f) only. This Remez-type inequality appears to be the first such estimate that is dimension-free (i.e., C does not depend on n). This dimension-free Remez-type inequality removes the main technical barrier to giving O(logn) sample complexity, polytime algorithms for learning low-degree polynomials on the hypergrid and low-degree observables on level-K qudit systems. In particular, our dimension-free Remez inequality implies new Bohnenblust--Hille-type estimates which are central to the learning algorithms and appear unobtainable via standard techniques. Thus we extend to new spaces a recent line of work \cite{EI22, CHP, VZ22} that gave similarly efficient methods for learning low-degree polynomials on the hypercube and observables on qubits. An additional product of these efforts is a new class of distributions over which arbitrary quantum observables are well-approximated by their low-degree truncations -- a phenomenon that greatly extends the reach of low-degree learning in quantum science \cite{CHP}.
We consider the problem of learning low-degree quantum objects up to ε-error in ℓ2-distance. We show the following results: (i) unknown n-qubit degree-d (in the Pauli basis) quantum channels and unitaries can be learned using O(1/εd) queries (independent of n), (ii) polynomials p:{−1,1}n→[−1,1] arising from d-query quantum algorithms can be classically learned from O((1/ε)d⋅logn) many random examples (x,p(x)) (which implies learnability even for d=O(logn)), and (iii) degree-d polynomials p:{−1,1}n→[−1,1] can be learned through O(1/εd) queries to a quantum unitary Up that block-encodes p. Our main technical contributions are new Bohnenblust-Hille inequalities for quantum channels and completely bounded~polynomials.
We study the number of uniform quantum examples needed to exactly learn a Boolean function with at most k nonzero Fourier coefficients. We give a learner with near-optimal O(k) sample complexity independent of the input length n. The learner uses only separate measurements of individual examples. This improves the previous O(k3/2log2k) upper bound (Arunachalam, Chakraborty, Lee, Paraashar, and de Wolf, 2021). The main ingredient is a candidate set formed by symmetric differences of subsets from independent groups of Fourier samples. A multilinear majority polynomial combines unbiased random approximations into an accurate witness whose Fourier support lies in this set. Granularity then forces the set to contain the entire Fourier support, including subsets never directly sampled. For comparison, we derive the tight classical sample complexity Θ(nk) by combining known sparse-recovery and lower-bound results.
As quantum computing progresses toward fault-tolerant architectures, the question of which computational tasks admit provable quantum advantages and which do not has become increasingly central. Learning theory, and in particular learning from quantum examples, provides one of the few settings in which unconditional quantum-classical separations can be established. In distribution-free (i.e., worst-case) PAC learning, existing results show that quantum examples provide no asymptotic advantage in sample complexity. In contrast, under the uniform distribution, unbounded quantum-classical separations are known for learning Fourier-sparse Boolean functions. Together, these results reveal a striking dichotomy. However, this understanding has largely been developed in the context of learning Boolean functions in the batch setting, leaving open how these phenomena extend more broadly. This thesis develops the theory of learning with quantum examples beyond the batch Boolean setting along three directions: multiclass learning, online learning, and smoothed learning. In the multiclass PAC setting, we establish upper and lower bounds on quantum sample complexity in both the realizable and agnostic regimes, finding that quantum examples continue to yield no distribution-independent separation from classical examples, with learning rates governed by the Natarajan dimension up to logarithmic factors in the label-space size. We next study online learning, where no standard framework for learning with quantum examples existed prior to this work. We provide such a model by lifting the classical online framework to one in which the adversary provides distributions over labeled examples, and then by encoding these distributions as quantum examples. We establish expected regret guarantees for binary and multiclass classification in both the realizable and agnostic settings. The central finding is that unrestricted adversarial power permits highly concentrated distributions that dequantize the learning problem. Motivated by this dequantization phenomenon, we develop a smoothed learning framework that constrains distributions to be smooth, interpolating between the concentrated-distribution regime, in which no quantum advantage exists, and the uniform-distribution regime, in which unbounded separations are known. For the class of Fourier-sparse Boolean functions, we establish the robustness of quantum Fourier sampling throughout a nontrivial near-uniform regime in the batch setting and observe that these guarantees extend naturally to the online setting. We further analyze several approaches to recovering the target function once its Fourier support has been identified and, based on these observations, formulate conjectures supporting the persistence of the unbounded quantum advantage throughout this regime. Together, these results paint a coherent picture of learning with quantum examples beyond the batch Boolean setting, showing that quantum-classical separations depend on the interplay between hypothesis class structure, distributional assumptions, and the degree of adversarial control permitted in the learning process.