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arXiv:2610.34696

Rank-one Factored Gradient Descent without Restricted Isometry: Application to Quantum Pure State Tomography on Multi-Qubits

Takahiro Kajisa

quant-phmath.OCSubmitted Oct 26, 2026• Announced Oct 27, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Factored gradient descent (FGD) is a scalable nonconvex method for low-rank positive semidefinite matrix recovery, in which the rank and positivity constraints are satisfied automatically by the factorization. Most of the existing theory that certifies benignity of its loss landscape, however, relies on a restricted isometry property (RIP) of the measurement map. In quantum state tomography, one of its applications, the measurements that can be acquired with stable statistics are limited by detection efficiency and drift to Pauli observables of low weight; we first show that under such partial-weight Pauli measurements RIP fails in the worst possible way. We then bundle the mutually commuting observables setting by setting, pushing the state forward to the probability distribution of each setting, and introduce a max-sliced total-variation loss. On the stratum where the setting attaining the maximum is unique there is no spurious local minimum, and provided only that the measurement map is injective on generic pure states, the global minimum is the truth up to a phase. Finally we verify these claims numerically on four qubits and compare against FGD with the ordinary loss.

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Factored gradient descent (FGD) is a scalable nonconvex method for low-rank positive semidefinite matrix recovery, in which the rank and positivity constraints are satisfied automatically by the factorization. Most of the existing theory that certifies benignity of its loss landscape, however, relies on a restricted isometry property (RIP) of the measurement map. In quantum state tomography, one of its applications, the measurements that can be acquired with stable statistics are limited by detection efficiency and drift to Pauli observables of low weight; we first show that under such partial-weight Pauli measurements RIP fails in the worst possible way. We then bundle the mutually commuting observables setting by setting, pushing the state forward to the probability distribution of each setting, and introduce a max-sliced total-variation loss. On the stratum where the setting attaining the maximum is unique there is no spurious local minimum, and provided only that the measurement map is injective on generic pure states, the global minimum is the truth up to a phase. Finally we verify these claims numerically on four qubits and compare against FGD with the ordinary loss.
The recovery of an unknown density matrix of large size requires huge computational resources. State-of-the-art performance has recently been achieved with the factored gradient descent (FGD) algorithm and its variants since they are able to mitigate the dimensionality barrier by utilizing some of the underlying structures of the density matrix. Despite the theoretical guarantee of a linear convergence rate, convergence in practical scenarios is still slow because the contracting factor of the FGD algorithms depends on the condition number κ of the ground truth state. Consequently, the total number of iterations needed to achieve the estimation error ϵ can be as large as O(sqrt[κ]ln(1/ϵ)). In this Letter, we derive a quantum state tomography scheme that improves the dependence on κ to the logarithmic scale. Thus, our algorithm can achieve the approximation error ϵ in O(ln(1/κϵ)) steps. The improvement comes from the application of nonconvex Riemannian gradient descent (RGD). The contracting factor in our approach is thus a universal constant that is independent of the given state. Our theoretical results of extremely fast convergence and nearly optimal error bounds are corroborated by the numerical results.
Reconstructing the state of quantum many-body systems is of fundamental importance in quantum information tasks, but extremely challenging due to the curse of dimensionality. In this work, we present an efficient quantum tomography protocol that combines the state-factored with eigenvalue mapping to address the rank-deficient issue and incorporates a momentum-accelerated gradient descent algorithm to speed up the optimization process. We implement extensive numerical experiments to demonstrate that our factored gradient descent algorithm efficiently mitigates the rank-deficient problem and admits orders of magnitude better tomography accuracy and faster convergence. We also find that our method can accomplish the full-state tomography of random 11-qubit mixed states within one minute. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We propose a distributed Quantum State Tomography (QST) protocol, named Local Stochastic Factored Gradient Descent (Local SFGD), to learn the low-rank factor of a density matrix over a set of local machines. QST is the canonical procedure to characterize the state of a quantum system, which we formulate as a stochastic non-convex smooth optimization problem. Physically, the estimation of a low-rank density matrix helps characterizing the amount of noise introduced by quantum computation. Theoretically, we prove the local convergence of Local SFGD for a general class of restricted strongly convex/smooth loss functions. Local SFGD converges locally to a small neighborhood of the global optimum at a linear rate with a constant step size, while it locally converges exactly at a sub-linear rate with diminishing step sizes. With a proper initialization, local convergence results imply global convergence. We validate our theoretical findings with numerical simulations of QST on the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state.
Existing quantum state tomography methods are limited in scalability due to their high computation and memory demands, making them impractical for the recovery of large quantum states. In this work, we address these limitations by reformulating the maximum likelihood estimation problem using the Burer--Monteiro factorization, resulting in a nonconvex but low-rank parametrization of the density matrix. We derive a fully unconstrained formulation by analytically eliminating the trace-one and positive-semidefinite constraints, thereby avoiding the need for projection steps during optimization. Furthermore, we determine the Lagrange multiplier associated with the unit-trace constraint a priori, reducing computational overhead. The resulting formulation is amenable to scalable first-order optimization, and we demonstrate its tractability using the limited-memory Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno method. Importantly, we also propose a low-memory version of the above algorithm to fully recover certain large quantum states with Pauli-based positive-operator-value measurements. Our low-memory algorithm avoids explicitly forming any density matrix, and does not require the density matrix to have a matrix product state or other tensor structure. For a fixed number of measurements and fixed rank, our algorithm requires just O(dlog2d)O(d{log}_{2}d)O(dlog2​d) complexity per iteration to recover a $d\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}d$ density matrix. Additionally, we derive a useful error bound that can be used to give a rigorous termination criterion. We numerically demonstrate that our method is competitive with state-of-the-art algorithms for moderately sized problems, and then demonstrate that our method can solve a 20-qubit problem on a laptop in under 5 hours.
Quantum state tomography estimates an unknown density operator from measurement data. Dense reconstruction however, can be impractical for many-qubit systems because the Hilbert-space dimension grows exponentially. This contribution develops a rank-adaptive matrix-free approach to low-rank quantum state tomography based on rank-one atomic coordinates. The density operator is represented as a convex combination of pure-state atoms, which preserves positivity and unit trace while avoiding dense density, measurement, and gradient matrices. The resultant algorithm combines atom updates, simplex-constrained coefficient reweighting, and periodic spectral refactorization using only predicted probability vectors, atom vectors, and descriptor-level measurement actions. These computations decompose across measurement outcomes, and admit a master--worker implementation with the measurements partitioned across workers. A rank penalty adapts the representation size during optimization. Provable feasibility, prediction consistency, monotone descent of the penalized objective, and an exact spectral proximal characterization of the refactorization step are established. Simulations with Pauli measurements show favorable accuracy--runtime--memory tradeoffs relative to competing alternatives.
Quantum superoperator learning is a pivotal task in quantum information science, enabling accurate reconstruction of unknown quantum operations from measurement data. We propose a robust approach based on the matrix sensing techniques for quantum superoperator learning that extends beyond the positive semidefinite case, encompassing both quantum channels and Lindbladians. We first introduce a randomized measurement design using a near-optimal number of measurements. By leveraging the restricted isometry property (RIP), we provide theoretical guarantees for the identifiability and recovery of low-rank superoperators in the presence of noise. Additionally, we propose a blockwise measurement design that restricts the tomography to the sub-blocks, significantly enhancing performance while maintaining a comparable scale of measurements. We also provide a performance guarantee for this setup. Our approach employs alternating least squares (ALS) with acceleration for optimization in matrix sensing. Numerical experiments validate the efficiency and scalability of the proposed methods.