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A Tight Lower Bound for Index Erasure

Nathan Lindzey, Ansis Rosmanis

Published Feb 19, 2019• 1 citation
OpenAlex

Abstract

The Index Erasure problem asks a quantum computer to prepare a uniform superposition over the image of an injective function given by an oracle. We prove a tight $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ lower bound on the quantum query complexity of the non-coherent case of the problem, where, in addition to preparing the required superposition, the algorithm is allowed to leave the ancillary memory in an arbitrary function-dependent state. This resolves an open question of Ambainis, Magnin, Roetteler, and Roland (CCC 2011), who gave a tight bound for the coherent case, the case where the ancillary memory must return to its initial state. The proof is based on evaluating certain Krein parameters of a symmetric association scheme defined over partial permutations. The study of this association scheme may be of independent interest.

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Variations on Quantum Adversary

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The Index Erasure problem asks a quantum computer to prepare a uniform superposition over the image of an injective function given by an oracle. We prove a tight Ω(n)\Omega(\sqrt{n})Ω(n​) lower bound on the quantum query complexity of the non-coherent case of the problem, where, in addition to preparing the required superposition, the algorithm is allowed to leave the ancillary memory in an arbitrary function-dependent state. This resolves an open question of Ambainis, Magnin, Roetteler, and Roland (CCC 2011), who gave a tight bound for the coherent case, the case where the ancillary memory must return to its initial state.
The proof is based on evaluating certain Krein parameters of a symmetric association scheme defined over partial permutations. The study of this association scheme may be of independent interest.
The index erasure problem is a quantum state generation problem that asks a quantum computer to prepare a uniform superposition over the image of an injective function given by an oracle. We prove a tight Ω(√n) lower bound on the quantum query complexity of the non-coherent case of the problem, where, in addition to preparing the required superposition, the algorithm is allowed to leave the ancillary memory in an arbitrary function-dependent state. This resolves an open question of Ambainis, Magnin, Roetteler, and Roland (CCC 2011), who gave a tight bound for the coherent case, the case where the ancillary memory must return to its initial state. To prove our main result, we first extend the so-called automorphism principle (Høyer et al. STOC 2007) to the general adversary method for state conversion problems (Lee et al. STOC 2011), which allows one to exploit the symmetries of these problems to lower bound their quantum query complexity. Using this method, we establish a strong connection between the quantum query complexity of non-coherent symmetric state generation problems and the well-known Krein parameters of association schemes. Krein parameters are usually hard to determine, nevertheless, we give a novel way of computing certain Krein parameters of a commutative association scheme defined over partial permutations. We believe the study of this association scheme may also be of independent interest.
The index erasure problem is a quantum state generation problem that asks a quantum computer to prepare a uniform superposition over the image of an injective function given by an oracle. We prove a tight Ω(n)\Omega(\sqrt{n})Ω(n​) lower bound on the quantum query complexity of the non-coherent case of the problem, where, in addition to preparing the required superposition, the algorithm is allowed to leave the ancillary memory in an arbitrary function-dependent state. This resolves an open question of Ambainis et al., who gave a tight bound for the coherent case, the case where the ancillary memory must return to its initial state. To prove our main result, we first extend the automorphism principle}of Hoyer et al. to the general adversary method of Lee et al. for state generation problems, which allows one to exploit the symmetries of these problems to lower bound their quantum query complexity. Using this method, we establish a strong connection between the quantum query complexity of non-coherent symmetric state generation problems and the Krein parameters of an association scheme defined on injective functions. In particular, we use the spherical harmonics a finite symmetric Gelfand pair associated with the space of injective functions to obtain asymptotic bounds on certain Krein parameters, from which the main result follows.
We establish tight lower bounds on the adaptive and non-adaptive quantum query complexities of Promised kkk-to-one Finding on an exactly kkk-to-one input string x∈Zqnx\in\mathbb Z_q^nx∈Zqn​, for every fixed k≥2k\ge2k≥2 and every feasible alphabet size q≥n/kq\ge n/kq≥n/k. The lower bounds are Ωk(n1/2−1/(2(2k−1)))Ω_k(n^{1/2-1/(2(2^k-1))})Ωk​(n1/2−1/(2(2k−1))) for unrestricted adaptive algorithms and Ωk(n1−1/k)Ω_k(n^{1-1/k})Ωk​(n1−1/k) for one-round non-adaptive algorithms. The former matches the adaptive quantum algorithm of Liu and Zhandry [LZ19], whereas the latter matches classical birthday sampling even when the parallel queries are arbitrarily entangled. We also establish the non-adaptive lower bound Ωk(n/k)Ω_k(\sqrt{n/k})Ωk​(n/k​) for kkk-to-one Testing when q≥nq\ge nq≥n, resolving an open question posed by Koiran, Landes, Portier, and Yao [KLPY10]. Our proofs generate the balanced input from a uniformly random permutation and use compressed permutation oracles to describe the information learned by the algorithm. The adaptive proof bounds the growth of partial collisions through successive queries. The one-round proof instead analyzes the state after the parallel queries directly, bounding the probability that the compressed database contains a full collision. In both proofs, a short verification step accounts for correct outputs that include unrecorded positions. For the decision problem, we also compare one-round states with independent and distinct output labels.
The Index-Erasure problem is a quantum state generation problem that asks a quantum computer to prepare a uniform superposition over the image of an injective function given by an oracle. We prove a tight Ω(n)Ω(\sqrt{n})Ω(n​) lower bound on the quantum query complexity of the non-coherent case of the problem, where, in addition to preparing the required superposition, the algorithm is allowed to leave the ancillary memory in an arbitrary function-dependent state. This resolves an open question of Ambainis et al., who gave a tight bound for the coherent case, the case where the ancillary memory must return to its initial state. To prove our main result, we first extend the automorphism principle of Høyer et al. to the general adversary method of Lee et al. for state generation problems, which allows one to exploit the symmetries of these problems to lower bound their quantum query complexity. Using this method, we establish a strong connection between the quantum query complexity of non-coherent symmetric state generation problems and the Krein parameters of an association scheme defined on injective functions. In particular, we use the spherical harmonics a finite symmetric Gelfand pair associated with the space of injective functions to obtain asymptotic bounds on certain Krein parameters, from which the main result follows.
Function inversion is the problem that given a random function f:[M]→[N]f: [M] \to [N]f:[M]→[N], we want to find pre-image of any image f−1(y)f^{-1}(y)f−1(y) in time TTT. In this work, we revisit this problem under the preprocessing model where we can compute some auxiliary information or advice of size SSS that only depends on fff but not on yyy. It is a well-studied problem in the classical settings, however, it is not clear how quantum algorithms can solve this task any better besides invoking Grover's algorithm, which does not leverage the power of preprocessing. Nayebi et al. proved a lower bound ST2≥Ω~(N)ST^2 \ge \tildeΩ(N)ST2≥Ω~(N) for quantum algorithms inverting permutations, however, they only consider algorithms with classical advice. Hhan et al. subsequently extended this lower bound to fully quantum algorithms for inverting permutations. In this work, we give the same asymptotic lower bound to fully quantum algorithms for inverting functions for fully quantum algorithms under the regime where M=O(N)M = O(N)M=O(N). In order to prove these bounds, we generalize the notion of quantum random access code, originally introduced by Ambainis et al., to the setting where we are given a list of (not necessarily independent) random variables, and we wish to compress them into a variable-length encoding such that we can retrieve a random element just using the encoding with high probability. As our main technical contribution, we give a nearly tight lower bound (for a wide parameter range) for this generalized notion of quantum random access codes, which may be of independent interest.
The (negative-weighted) quantum adversary bound is a tight characterisation of the quantum query complexity for any partial function. We analyse the extent to which this bound can be generalised. Ambainis et al. [arXiv:1012.2112] and Lee et al. [arXiv:1011.3020] generalised this bound to the state generation and state conversion problems, respectively. Using the ideas by Lee et al., we get even further generalisations of the bound. We obtain a version of the bound for general input oracles, which are just arbitrary unitaries. We also generalise the bound to the problem of implementing arbitrary unitary transformations. Similarly to the bound by Lee et al., our bound is a lower bound for exact transformation and an upper bound for approximate transformation. This version of the bound possesses the tight composition property. Using this construction, we also obtain lower bounds on the quantum query complexity of functions and relations with general input oracles.