arXiv subjects

Anupam Prakash

Publications and source records attributed to Anupam Prakash.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Mechanisms for Quantum Advantage in Global Optimization of Nonconvex Functions

We present new theoretical mechanisms for quantum speedup in the global optimization of nonconvex functions, expanding the scope of quantum advantage beyond traditional tunneling-based explanations. As our main building-block, we demonstrate a rigorous correspondence between the spectral properties of Schrödinger operators and the mixing times of classical Langevin diffusion. This correspondence motivates a mechanism for separation on functions with unique global minimum: while quantum algorithms operate on the original potential, classical diffusions correspond to a Schrödinger operators with a WKB potential having nearly degenerate global minima. We formalize these ideas by proving that a real-space adiabatic quantum algorithm (RsAA) achieves provably polynomial-time optimization for broad families of nonconvex functions. First, for block-separable functions, we show that RsAA maintains polynomial runtime while known off-the-shelf algorithms require exponential time and structure-aware algorithms exhibit arbitrarily large polynomial runtimes. These results leverage novel non-asymptotic results in semiclassical analysis. Second, we use recent advances in the theory of intrinsic hypercontractivity to demonstrate polynomial runtimes for RsAA on appropriately perturbed strongly convex functions that lack global structure, while off-the-shelf algorithms remain exponentially bottlenecked. In contrast to prior works based on quantum tunneling, these separations do not depend on the geometry of barriers between local minima. Our theoretical claims about classical algorithm runtimes are supported by rigorous analysis and comprehensive numerical benchmarking. These findings establish a rigorous theoretical foundation for quantum advantage in continuous optimization and open new research directions connecting quantum algorithms, stochastic processes, and semiclassical analysis.

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arXiv2024

Quantum Spin Chains and Symmetric Functions

We consider the question of what quantum spin chains naturally encode in their Hilbert space. It turns out that quantum spin chains are rather rich systems, naturally encoding solutions to various problems in combinatorics, group theory, and algebraic geometry. In the case of the XX Heisenberg spin chain these are given by skew Kostka numbers, skew characters of the symmetric group, and Littlewood-Richardson coefficients. As we show, this is revealed by a fermionic representation of the theory of "quantized" symmetric functions formulated by Fomin and Greene, which provides a powerful framework for constructing operators extracting this data from the Hilbert space of quantum spin chains. Furthermore, these operators are diagonalized by the Bethe basis of the quantum spin chain. Underlying this is the fact that quantum spin chains are examples of "quantum integrable systems." This is somewhat analogous to bosons encoding permanents and fermions encoding determinants. This points towards considering quantum integrable systems, and the combinatorics associated with them, as potentially interesting targets for quantum computers.

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arXiv2024

Quantum option pricing via the Karhunen-Loève expansion

We consider the problem of pricing discretely monitored Asian options over $T$ monitoring points where the underlying asset is modeled by a geometric Brownian motion. We provide two quantum algorithms with complexity poly-logarithmic in $T$ and polynomial in $1/ε$, where $ε$ is the additive approximation error. Our algorithms are obtained respectively by using an $O(\log T)$-qubit semi-digital quantum encoding of the Brownian motion that allows for exponentiation of the stochastic process and by analyzing classical Monte Carlo algorithms inspired by the semi-digital encodings. The best quantum algorithm obtained using this approach has complexity $\widetilde{O}(1/ε^{3})$ where the $\widetilde{O}$ suppresses factors poly-logarithmic in $T$ and $1/ε$. The methods proposed in this work generalize to pricing options where the underlying asset price is modeled by a smooth function of a sub-Gaussian process and the payoff is dependent on the weighted time-average of the underlying asset price.

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arXiv2023

Efficient quantum loading of probability distributions through Feynman propagators

We present quantum algorithms for the loading of probability distributions using Hamiltonian simulation for one dimensional Hamiltonians of the form ${\hat H}= Δ+ V(x) \mathbb{I}$. We consider the potentials $V(x)$ for which the Feynman propagator is known to have an analytically closed form and utilize these Hamiltonians to load probability distributions including the normal, Laplace and Maxwell-Boltzmann into quantum states. We also propose a variational method for probability distribution loading based on constructing a coarse approximation to the distribution in the form of a `ladder state' and then projecting onto the ground state of a Hamiltonian chosen to have the desired probability distribution as ground state. These methods extend the suite of techniques available for the loading of probability distributions, and are more efficient than general purpose data loading methods used in quantum machine learning.

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arXiv2023

A quantum spectral method for simulating stochastic processes, with applications to Monte Carlo

Stochastic processes play a fundamental role in physics, mathematics, engineering and finance. One potential application of quantum computation is to better approximate properties of stochastic processes. For example, quantum algorithms for Monte Carlo estimation combine a quantum simulation of a stochastic process with amplitude estimation to improve mean estimation. In this work we study quantum algorithms for simulating stochastic processes which are compatible with Monte Carlo methods. We introduce a new ``analog'' quantum representation of stochastic processes, in which the value of the process at time t is stored in the amplitude of the quantum state, enabling an exponentially efficient encoding of process trajectories. We show that this representation allows for highly efficient quantum algorithms for simulating certain stochastic processes, using spectral properties of these processes combined with the quantum Fourier transform. In particular, we show that we can simulate $T$ timesteps of fractional Brownian motion using a quantum circuit with gate complexity $\text{polylog}(T)$, which coherently prepares the superposition over Brownian paths. We then show this can be combined with quantum mean estimation to create end to end algorithms for estimating certain time averages over processes in time $O(\text{polylog}(T)ε^{-c})$ where $3/2<c<2$ for certain variants of fractional Brownian motion, whereas classical Monte Carlo runs in time $O(Tε^{-2})$ and quantum mean estimation in time $O(Tε^{-1})$. Along the way we give an efficient algorithm to coherently load a quantum state with Gaussian amplitudes of differing variances, which may be of independent interest.

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arXiv2022

Medical image classification via quantum neural networks

Machine Learning provides powerful tools for a variety of applications, including disease diagnosis through medical image classification. In recent years, quantum machine learning techniques have been put forward as a way to potentially enhance performance in machine learning applications, both through quantum algorithms for linear algebra and quantum neural networks. In this work, we study two different quantum neural network techniques for medical image classification: first by employing quantum circuits in training of classical neural networks, and second, by designing and training quantum orthogonal neural networks. We benchmark our techniques on two different imaging modalities, retinal color fundus images and chest X-rays. The results show the promises of such techniques and the limitations of current quantum hardware.

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arXiv2022

Quantum Methods for Neural Networks and Application to Medical Image Classification

Quantum machine learning techniques have been proposed as a way to potentially enhance performance in machine learning applications. In this paper, we introduce two new quantum methods for neural networks. The first one is a quantum orthogonal neural network, which is based on a quantum pyramidal circuit as the building block for implementing orthogonal matrix multiplication. We provide an efficient way for training such orthogonal neural networks; novel algorithms are detailed for both classical and quantum hardware, where both are proven to scale asymptotically better than previously known training algorithms. The second method is quantum-assisted neural networks, where a quantum computer is used to perform inner product estimation for inference and training of classical neural networks. We then present extensive experiments applied to medical image classification tasks using current state of the art quantum hardware, where we compare different quantum methods with classical ones, on both real quantum hardware and simulators. Our results show that quantum and classical neural networks generates similar level of accuracy, supporting the promise that quantum methods can be useful in solving visual tasks, given the advent of better quantum hardware.

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arXiv2022

Low depth algorithms for quantum amplitude estimation

We design and analyze two new low depth algorithms for amplitude estimation (AE) achieving an optimal tradeoff between the quantum speedup and circuit depth. For $β\in (0,1]$, our algorithms require $N= \tilde{O}( \frac{1}{ ε^{1+β}})$ oracle calls and require the oracle to be called sequentially $D= O( \frac{1}{ ε^{1-β}})$ times to perform amplitude estimation within additive error $ε$. These algorithms interpolate between the classical algorithm $(β=1)$ and the standard quantum algorithm ($β=0$) and achieve a tradeoff $ND= O(1/ε^{2})$. These algorithms bring quantum speedups for Monte Carlo methods closer to realization, as they can provide speedups with shallower circuits. The first algorithm (Power law AE) uses power law schedules in the framework introduced by Suzuki et al \cite{S20}. The algorithm works for $β\in (0,1]$ and has provable correctness guarantees when the log-likelihood function satisfies regularity conditions required for the Bernstein Von-Mises theorem. The second algorithm (QoPrime AE) uses the Chinese remainder theorem for combining lower depth estimates to achieve higher accuracy. The algorithm works for discrete $β=q/k$ where $k \geq 2$ is the number of distinct coprime moduli used by the algorithm and $1 \leq q \leq k-1$, and has a fully rigorous correctness proof. We analyze both algorithms in the presence of depolarizing noise and provide numerical comparisons with the state of the art amplitude estimation algorithms.

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arXiv2022

Quantum Reinforcement Learning via Policy Iteration

Quantum computing has shown the potential to substantially speed up machine learning applications, in particular for supervised and unsupervised learning. Reinforcement learning, on the other hand, has become essential for solving many decision making problems and policy iteration methods remain the foundation of such approaches. In this paper, we provide a general framework for performing quantum reinforcement learning via policy iteration. We validate our framework by designing and analyzing: \emph{quantum policy evaluation} methods for infinite horizon discounted problems by building quantum states that approximately encode the value function of a policy $π$; and \emph{quantum policy improvement} methods by post-processing measurement outcomes on these quantum states. Last, we study the theoretical and experimental performance of our quantum algorithms on two environments from OpenAI's Gym.

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arXiv2022

Quantum machine learning with subspace states

We introduce a new approach for quantum linear algebra based on quantum subspace states and present three new quantum machine learning algorithms. The first is a quantum determinant sampling algorithm that samples from the distribution $\Pr[S]= det(X_{S}X_{S}^{T})$ for $|S|=d$ using $O(nd)$ gates and with circuit depth $O(d\log n)$. The state of art classical algorithm for the task requires $O(d^{3})$ operations \cite{derezinski2019minimax}. The second is a quantum singular value estimation algorithm for compound matrices $\mathcal{A}^{k}$, the speedup for this algorithm is potentially exponential. It decomposes a $\binom{n}{k}$ dimensional vector of order-$k$ correlations into a linear combination of subspace states corresponding to $k$-tuples of singular vectors of $A$. The third algorithm reduces exponentially the depth of circuits used in quantum topological data analysis from $O(n)$ to $O(\log n)$. Our basic tool are quantum subspace states, defined as $|Col(X)\rangle = \sum_{S\subset [n], |S|=d} det(X_{S}) |S\rangle$ for matrices $X \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d}$ such that $X^{T} X = I_{d}$, that encode $d$-dimensional subspaces of $\mathbb{R}^{n}$. We develop two efficient state preparation techniques, the first using Givens circuits uses the representation of a subspace as a sequence of Givens rotations, while the second uses efficient implementations of unitaries $Γ(x) = \sum_{i} x_{i} Z^{\otimes (i-1)} \otimes X \otimes I^{n-i}$ with $O(\log n)$ depth circuits that we term Clifford loaders.

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arXiv2021

Low depth amplitude estimation on a trapped ion quantum computer

Amplitude estimation is a fundamental quantum algorithmic primitive that enables quantum computers to achieve quadratic speedups for a large class of statistical estimation problems, including Monte Carlo methods. The main drawback from the perspective of near term hardware implementations is that the amplitude estimation algorithm requires very deep quantum circuits. Recent works have succeeded in somewhat reducing the necessary resources for such algorithms, by trading off some of the speedup for lower depth circuits, but high quality qubits are still needed for demonstrating such algorithms. Here, we report the results of an experimental demonstration of amplitude estimation on a state-of-the-art trapped ion quantum computer. The amplitude estimation algorithms were used to estimate the inner product of randomly chosen four-dimensional unit vectors, and were based on the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) techniques. Significant improvements in accuracy were observed for the MLE based approach when deeper quantum circuits were taken into account, including circuits with more than ninety two-qubit gates and depth sixty, achieving a mean additive estimation error on the order of $10^{-2}$. The CRT based approach was found to provide accurate estimates for many of the data points but was less robust against noise on average. Last, we analyze two more amplitude estimation algorithms that take into account the specifics of the hardware noise to further improve the results.

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arXiv2021

Quantum algorithms for Second-Order Cone Programming and Support Vector Machines

We present a quantum interior-point method (IPM) for second-order cone programming (SOCP) that runs in time $\widetilde{O} \left( n\sqrt{r} \frac{ζκ}{δ^2} \log \left(1/ε\right) \right)$ where $r$ is the rank and $n$ the dimension of the SOCP, $δ$ bounds the distance of intermediate solutions from the cone boundary, $ζ$ is a parameter upper bounded by $\sqrt{n}$, and $κ$ is an upper bound on the condition number of matrices arising in the classical IPM for SOCP. The algorithm takes as its input a suitable quantum description of an arbitrary SOCP and outputs a classical description of a $δ$-approximate $ε$-optimal solution of the given problem. Furthermore, we perform numerical simulations to determine the values of the aforementioned parameters when solving the SOCP up to a fixed precision $ε$. We present experimental evidence that in this case our quantum algorithm exhibits a polynomial speedup over the best classical algorithms for solving general SOCPs that run in time $O(n^{ω+0.5})$ (here, $ω$ is the matrix multiplication exponent, with a value of roughly $2.37$ in theory, and up to $3$ in practice). For the case of random SVM (support vector machine) instances of size $O(n)$, the quantum algorithm scales as $O(n^k)$, where the exponent $k$ is estimated to be $2.59$ using a least-squares power law. On the same family random instances, the estimated scaling exponent for an external SOCP solver is $3.31$ while that for a state-of-the-art SVM solver is $3.11$.

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arXiv2021

Quantum gradient descent for linear systems and least squares

Quantum machine learning and optimization are exciting new areas that have been brought forward by the breakthrough quantum algorithm of Harrow, Hassidim and Lloyd for solving systems of linear equations. The utility of {classical} linear system solvers extends beyond linear algebra as they can be leveraged to solve optimization problems using iterative methods like gradient descent. In this work, we provide the first quantum method for performing gradient descent when the gradient is an affine function. Performing $τ$ steps of the gradient descent requires time $O(τC_S)$ for weighted least squares problems, where $C_S$ is the cost of performing one step of the gradient descent quantumly, which at times can be considerably smaller than the classical cost. We illustrate our method by providing two applications: first, for solving positive semidefinite linear systems, and, second, for performing stochastic gradient descent for the weighted least squares problem with reduced quantum memory requirements. We also provide a quantum linear system solver in the QRAM data structure model that provides significant savings in cost for large families of matrices.

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arXiv2020

Nearest Centroid Classification on a Trapped Ion Quantum Computer

Quantum machine learning has seen considerable theoretical and practical developments in recent years and has become a promising area for finding real world applications of quantum computers. In pursuit of this goal, here we combine state-of-the-art algorithms and quantum hardware to provide an experimental demonstration of a quantum machine learning application with provable guarantees for its performance and efficiency. In particular, we design a quantum Nearest Centroid classifier, using techniques for efficiently loading classical data into quantum states and performing distance estimations, and experimentally demonstrate it on a 11-qubit trapped-ion quantum machine, matching the accuracy of classical nearest centroid classifiers for the MNIST handwritten digits dataset and achieving up to 100% accuracy for 8-dimensional synthetic data.

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arXiv2020

Prospects and challenges of quantum finance

Quantum computers are expected to have substantial impact on the finance industry, as they will be able to solve certain problems considerably faster than the best known classical algorithms. In this article we describe such potential applications of quantum computing to finance, starting with the state-of-the-art and focusing in particular on recent works by the QC Ware team. We consider quantum speedups for Monte Carlo methods, portfolio optimization, and machine learning. For each application we describe the extent of quantum speedup possible and estimate the quantum resources required to achieve a practical speedup. The near-term relevance of these quantum finance algorithms varies widely across applications - some of them are heuristic algorithms designed to be amenable to near-term prototype quantum computers, while others are proven speedups which require larger-scale quantum computers to implement. We also describe powerful ways to bring these speedups closer to experimental feasibility - in particular describing lower depth algorithms for Monte Carlo methods and quantum machine learning, as well as quantum annealing heuristics for portfolio optimization. This article is targeted at financial professionals and no particular background in quantum computation is assumed.

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arXiv2020

Quantum Expectation-Maximization for Gaussian Mixture Models

The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a fundamental tool in unsupervised machine learning. It is often used as an efficient way to solve Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation problems, especially for models with latent variables. It is also the algorithm of choice to fit mixture models: generative models that represent unlabelled points originating from $k$ different processes, as samples from $k$ multivariate distributions. In this work we define and use a quantum version of EM to fit a Gaussian Mixture Model. Given quantum access to a dataset of $n$ vectors of dimension $d$, our algorithm has convergence and precision guarantees similar to the classical algorithm, but the runtime is only polylogarithmic in the number of elements in the training set, and is polynomial in other parameters - as the dimension of the feature space, and the number of components in the mixture. We generalize further the algorithm in two directions. First, we show how to fit any mixture model of probability distributions in the exponential family. Then, we show how to use this algorithm to compute the Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) estimate of a mixture model: the Bayesian approach to likelihood estimation problems. We discuss the performance of the algorithm on a dataset that is expected to be classified successfully by this algorithm, arguing that on those cases we can give strong guarantees on the runtime.

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arXiv2019

Quantum Algorithms for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Quantum computing is a new computational paradigm that promises applications in several fields, including machine learning. In the last decade, deep learning, and in particular Convolutional neural networks (CNN), have become essential for applications in signal processing and image recognition. Quantum deep learning, however remains a challenging problem, as it is difficult to implement non linearities with quantum unitaries. In this paper we propose a quantum algorithm for applying and training deep convolutional neural networks with a potential speedup. The quantum CNN (QCNN) is a shallow circuit, reproducing completely the classical CNN, by allowing non linearities and pooling operations. The QCNN is particularly interesting for deep networks and could allow new frontiers in image recognition, by using more or larger convolution kernels, larger or deeper inputs. We introduce a new quantum tomography algorithm with $\ell_{\infty}$ norm guarantees, and new applications of probabilistic sampling in the context of information processing. We also present numerical simulations for the classification of the MNIST dataset to provide practical evidence for the efficiency of the QCNN.

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arXiv2019

Quantum Algorithms for Portfolio Optimization

We develop the first quantum algorithm for the constrained portfolio optimization problem. The algorithm has running time $\widetilde{O} \left( n\sqrt{r} \frac{ζκ}{δ^2} \log \left(1/ε\right) \right)$, where $r$ is the number of positivity and budget constraints, $n$ is the number of assets in the portfolio, $ε$ the desired precision, and $δ, κ, ζ$ are problem-dependent parameters related to the well-conditioning of the intermediate solutions. If only a moderately accurate solution is required, our quantum algorithm can achieve a polynomial speedup over the best classical algorithms with complexity $\widetilde{O} \left( \sqrt{r}n^ω\log(1/ε) \right)$, where $ω$ is the matrix multiplication exponent that has a theoretical value of around $2.373$, but is closer to $3$ in practice. We also provide some experiments to bound the problem-dependent factors arising in the running time of the quantum algorithm, and these experiments suggest that for most instances the quantum algorithm can potentially achieve an $O(n)$ speedup over its classical counterpart.

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