Quantum Speedups for Stochastic Optimization with Heavy-Tailed Noise

Abstract

We study stochastic optimization with heavy-tailed gradient noise. We first propose a novel quantum mean estimator for multivariate heavy-tailed random variables that achieves lower query complexity than optimal classical estimators in the low-dimensional regime. We further develop an unbiased quantum mean estimator by applying a generalized multi-level Monte Carlo technique. We prove quantum lower bounds showing that, when the dimension $d$ of the random vector is small and can be viewed as a constant, our quantum estimators are optimal up to logarithmic factors. We further derive stronger dimension-dependent lower bounds for tail index $p>4/3$, showing that a nontrivial dependence on the dimension is unavoidable in the low-dimensional regime. Based on these estimators, we propose a quantum normalized stochastic gradient descent method ($\texttt{QNSGD}$), which finds an $ε$-stationary point using $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\big(\sqrt d\,ε^{-\frac{5p-4}{2p-2}}\big)$ queries to the quantum stochastic gradient oracle. For a convex objective function, we propose a quantum projected stochastic gradient descent method ($\texttt{QPSGD}$), which computes a solution with $ε$-optimal solution using $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\big(\sqrt d\,ε^{-\frac{3p-2}{2p-2}}+ε^{-2}\big)$ queries in expectation. These sharper bounds improve upon the classical lower bounds $Ω\big(ε^{-\frac{3p-2}{p-1}}\big)$ for nonconvex problems and $Ω\big(ε^{-\frac{p}{p-1}}\big)$ for convex problems in the low-dimensional regimes $d\lesssimε^{-\frac{p}{p-1}}$ and $d\lesssimε^{-\frac{2-p}{p-1}}$, respectively.