Efficient learning of bosonic unitaries beyond the Gaussian class

Abstract

Multimode quantum processes are generally difficult to learn, due to the large dimensionality and complex entanglement structure beyond the Gaussian class. Here, we show that the fundamental obstruction is not non-Gaussianity itself, but the buildup of irreducible multimode non-Gaussian correlations. We establish a tractability frontier for bosonic unitary learning: a general $m$-mode unitary with input energy at most $E$ per mode requires at least $\Omega(E^{2m})$ channel uses, whereas two broad non-Gaussian families---$t$-doped Gaussian unitaries and Gaussian-entanglable unitaries---can be learned with resources polynomial in $m$. The latter can exhibit both extensive non-Gaussianity and strong multimode entanglement. Our forward-only protocols use coherent-state probes, Gaussian operations, local heterodyne detection, and classical post-processing to identify the global Gaussian mixing and reduce the remaining task to single- or few-mode learning. The analysis also yields a multimode quantum Darmois--Skitovich theorem showing that mode-spreading passive networks preserve product structure only for Gaussian input states, an almost-sure activation theorem for non-Gaussian processes showing that non-Gaussian unitaries yield non-Gaussian outputs for almost all coherent input states, and a method for learning unitaries from uncalibrated coherent probes. Our results identify that complexity of learning arises from irreducible mixing of non-Gaussianity and entanglement, rather than either resource alone.