While quantum algorithms for solving large scale systems of linear equations offer potentially exponential speedups, their application has largely been confined to sparse matrices. This work extends the scope of these algorithms to a broad class of structured dense matrices arise in potential theory, covariance modeling, and computational physics, namely, hierarchically block separable (HBS) matrices. We develop two distinct methods to make these systems amenable to quantum solvers. The first is a pre-processing approach that transforms the dense matrix into a larger but sparse format. The second is a direct block encoding scheme that recursively constructs the necessary oracles from the HBS structure. We provide a detailed complexity analysis and rigorous error bounds for both methods. Numerical experiments are presented to validate the effectiveness of our approaches.
While quantum algorithms for solving large scale systems of linear equations offer potentially exponential speedups, their application has largely been confined to sparse matrices. This work extends the scope of these algorithms to a broad class of structured dense matrices arise in potential theory, covariance modeling, and computational physics, namely, hierarchically block separable (HBS) matrices. We develop two distinct methods to make these systems amenable to quantum solvers. The first is a pre-processing approach that transforms the dense matrix into a larger but sparse format. The second is a direct block encoding scheme that recursively constructs the necessary oracles from the HBS structure. We provide a detailed complexity analysis and rigorous error bounds for both methods. Numerical experiments are presented to validate the effectiveness of our approaches.
Many quantum algorithms for numerical linear algebra assume black-box access to a block-encoding of the matrix of interest, which is a strong assumption when the matrix is not sparse. Kernel matrices, which arise from discretizing a kernel function k(x,x′) , have a variety of applications in mathematics and engineering. They are generally dense and full-rank. Classically, the celebrated fast multipole method performs matrix multiplication on kernel matrices of dimension N in time almost linear in N by using the linear algebraic framework of hierarchical matrices. In light of this success, we propose a block-encoding scheme of the hierarchical matrix structure on a quantum computer. When applied to many physical kernel matrices, our method can improve the runtime of solving quantum linear systems of dimension N to O(κpolylog(Nε)) , where κ and ε are the condition number and error bound of the matrix operation. This runtime is near-optimal and, in terms of N , exponentially improves over prior quantum linear systems algorithms in the case of dense and full-rank kernel matrices. We discuss possible applications of our methodology in solving integral equations and accelerating computations in N-body problems.
Along with the development of quantum technology, finding useful applications of quantum computers has been a central pursuit. Despite various quantum algorithms have been developed, many of them often require strong input assumptions, which is hardware demanding. In particular, recent advances on dequantization have revealed that the quantum advantage is more of a mere artifact of strong input assumptions. In this work, we propose a variant of these algorithms, leveraging both classical and quantum resources. Provided the classical knowledge (the entries) of the matrix/vector of interest, a classical procedure is used to pre-process this information. Then they are fed into a quantum circuit which is shown to be a block encoding of the matrix of interest. From this block-encoding, we show how to use it to tackle a wide range of problems, including principal component analysis, linear equation solving, Hamiltonian simulation, preparing ground state, and data fitting. We also analyze our protocol, showing that both the classical and quantum procedure can achieve logarithmic complexity in the input dimension, thus implying its potential for near term realization. We then discuss several implications and corollaries of our result. First,, our results suggest there are certain matrices/Hamiltonians where our method can provide exponential improvement compared to the existing ones with respect to the sparsity. Regarding dense linear systems, our method achieves exponential speed-up with respect to the inverse of error tolerance, compared to the best previously known quantum algorithm for dense systems. Last, and most importantly, regarding quantum data fitting, we show how the output of our quantum algorithms can be leveraged to predict unseen data. Thus, it provides an end-to-end application, which has been an open aspect of the previous quantum data fitting algorithm.
Abstract. Many standard linear algebra problems can be solved on a quantum computer by using recently developed quantum linear algebra algorithms that make use of block encodings and quantum eigenvalue/singular value transformations. A block encoding embeds a properly scaled matrix of interest [Formula: see text] in a larger unitary transformation [Formula: see text] that can be decomposed into a product of simpler unitaries and implemented efficiently on a quantum computer. Although quantum algorithms can potentially achieve exponential speedup in solving linear algebra problems compared to the best classical algorithm, such a gain in efficiency ultimately hinges on our ability to construct an efficient quantum circuit for the block encoding of [Formula: see text], which is difficult in general, and not trivial even for well structured sparse matrices. In this paper, we give a few examples on how efficient quantum circuits can be explicitly constructed for some well structured sparse matrices and discuss a few strategies used in these constructions. We also provide implementations of these quantum circuits in MATLAB.
Quantum block encoding (QBE) is a crucial step in the development of most quantum algorithms, as it provides an embedding of a given matrix into a suitable larger unitary matrix. Historically, the development of efficient techniques for QBE has mostly focused on sparse matrices; less effort has been devoted to data-sparse (e.g., rank-structured) matrices.
In this work we examine a particular case of rank structure, namely, one-pair semiseparable matrices. We present a new block encoding approach that relies on a suitable factorization of the given matrix as the product of triangular and diagonal factors. To encode the matrix, the algorithm needs 2log(N)+7 ancillary qubits.
Assuming that the data input oracles can be implemented with polylogarithmic depth, or that a QRAM input model is available, our proposed method requires O(polylog(N)) time and has an error of O(N2), where N is the matrix size.
Block encoding is a successful technique used in several powerful quantum algorithms. In this work we provide an explicit quantum circuit for block encoding a sparse matrix with a periodic diagonal structure. The proposed methodology is based on the linear combination of unitaries (LCU) framework and on an efficient unitary operator used to project the complex exponential at a frequency ω multiplied by the computational basis into its real and imaginary components. We demonstrate a distinct computational advantage with a O(poly(n)) gate complexity, where n is the number of qubits, in the worst-case scenario used for banded matrices, and O(n) when dealing with a simple diagonal matrix, compared to the exponential scaling of general-purpose methods for dense matrices. Various applications for the presented methodology are discussed in the context of solving differential problems such as the advection-diffusion-reaction (ADR) dynamics, using quantum algorithms with optimal scaling, e.g., quantum singular value transformation (QSVT). Numerical results are used to validate the analytical formulation.
Block encoding of sparse matrices underpins quantum algorithms such as quantum singular value transformation, Hamiltonian simulation, and quantum linear system solvers, yet its efficient gate-level realization remains challenging, with index-mapping oracles constituting one important source of overhead. We introduce a block-encoding framework that focuses on the index-mapping component, where coherent permutation is used as the central mechanism to optimize shift, delete, and insert operations. This provides a unified treatment of index mapping and reduces local multicontrolled X control complexity through structured compression. We further connect coherent amplitude permutation to combinatorial optimization, enabling systematic assignment of control states under hardware connectivity constraints. The resulting construction supports entrywise block encoding for general sparse matrices, with efficiency gains in structured cases. We demonstrate the approach on representative examples and provide resource analysis using IBM superconducting backends, showing significant reductions in circuit depth.