arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to François Le Gall.
We show that there exists a total function for which there is a polynomial gap between the randomized and the constant-round quantum communication complexity. Previously, such a separation was known only for quantum protocols using polynomially many rounds.
We refine Gavinsky's framework (arXiv:2608.18784) for exponential separations between quantum and randomized communication complexity of total functions and obtain larger separations: polylogarithmic quantum communication versus $\tildeΩ(\sqrt n)$ randomized communication with two quantum messages, and versus $Ω(n^{1-\varepsilon})$ for every fixed $0<\varepsilon<1$ with more quantum messages.
We prove the first non-trivial upper bound for the quantum query complexity of Boolean Matrix Product Verification ($\mathsf{BMPV}$), answering a longstanding open question in quantum query complexity. For $n\times n$ matrices, our upper bound is $\widetilde O(n^{17/12})$, improving on the standard $O(n^{3/2})$ bound obtained using Grover search by Buhrman and Špalek [SODA 2006]. We complement this result by showing an $Ω(n^{5/4})$ lower bound, which improves over the previous best known lower bound of $\widetildeΩ(n^{19/18})$ by Childs, Kimmel, and Kothari [ESA 2012]. Our approach centers on a connection with Orthogonal Vectors ($\mathsf{OV}$), which asks whether an indexed list of $n$ Boolean vectors of dimension $n$ contains two vectors with disjoint supports. In particular, we prove equivalences between $\mathsf{OV}$ and $\mathsf{BMPV}$ and establish the above bounds for $\mathsf{OV}$. We also prove a tight $\widetilde Θ(n^{3/2})$ bound for a variant of $\mathsf{BMPV}$ that asks whether the product contains a given row vector. Together, these results imply a polynomial separation between the quantum query complexities of deciding whether a graph has radius at most two and whether it has diameter at most two.
The local Hamiltonian problem is the canonical $\mathsf{QMA}$-complete problem, and $O(2^n)$ time classical algorithms and $O(2^{n/2})$ time quantum algorithms are known to solve the problem in the worst case. It is not clear how to improve these brute force strategies for a broad class of the problem because ground states are highly entangled in general, and we cannot directly apply known strategies for classical CSPs. In this work, we present exponentially faster classical and quantum algorithms under two mild assumptions: (1) the Hamiltonian is frustration-free on YES instances, and (2) it is approximately regular, meaning that every qubit is acted upon by approximately the same number of constraints. We complement these upper bounds by showing that, assuming (Q)SETH, quantum 5-SAT admits no non-trivial worst-case speedup. Our lower bound further demonstrates that the dependence of our algorithms on regularity is in some sense nearly optimal. Specifically, quantum 5-SAT remains (Q)SETH-hard even for Hamiltonians in which all but $O(\sqrt{n})$ qubits participate in only constantly many constraints, while the remaining $O(\sqrt{n})$ qubits each participate in $O(\sqrt{n})$ constraints. By contrast, if either the size of this high-degree subset or the degrees of its qubits is reduced by a factor of $n^δ$, for any $δ>0$, our algorithm solves the problem in time $O(2^{(1- \varepsilon)n})$ for some $\varepsilon>0$. Together, our upper and lower bounds establish a fine-grained complexity dichotomy for quantum satisfiability.
Low-energy estimation and state preparation for general $k$-local Hamiltonians are fundamental challenges in quantum complexity theory. Buhrman et al.~ [BGLGST, PRL 2025] recently broke the natural Grover bound $O^\ast(2^{n/2})$ for both problems, with the improvement depending on the relative accuracy $\varepsilon$ and the locality $k$. In this work, we present faster exponential quantum algorithms for these problems, where the binary entropy function governs the runtime exponent. For sufficiently small $\varepsilon/k$, our algorithms improve the exponent by a factor of $\log(k/\varepsilon)$ over [BGLGST, PRL 2025]. Our main technical result is an entropy-governed lower bound on the dimension of the Hamiltonian's low-energy subspace, obtained by depolarizing its ground state. For fixed $k$, this bound is optimal up to constant factors in the exponent. The same framework yields tighter bounds for Heisenberg, $XY$, and Ising models on arbitrary interaction graphs.
We give new dequantization and hardness results for estimating spectral sums of matrices, such as the log-determinant. Recent quantum algorithms have demonstrated that the logarithm of the determinant of sparse, well-conditioned, positive matrices can be approximated to $\varepsilon$-relative accuracy in time polylogarithmic in the dimension $N$, specifically in time $\poly(\log(N), s, κ, 1/\varepsilon)$, where $s$ is the sparsity and $κ$ the condition number of the input matrix. We provide a simple dequantization of these techniques that preserves the polylogarithmic dependence on the dimension. Our classical algorithm for the log-determinant runs in time $\polylog(N)\cdot s^{O(\sqrtκ\log(κ/\varepsilon))}$ which constitutes an exponential improvement over previous classical algorithms in certain parameter regimes. We complement our classical upper bounds with complexity-theoretic limitations. We prove that estimating normalized traces of polynomial powers and inverses of log-local Hamiltonians to inverse-polynomial additive accuracy is DQC1-complete, resolving an open problem of Cade and Montanaro (TQC 2018) concerning the complexity of Schatten-$p$ norm estimation. Finally, we prove a general PP-completeness result for unnormalized spectral sums: under mild polynomial-approximability and nondegeneracy assumptions on $f$, estimating $\mathrm{tr}[f(A)]$ to constant additive accuracy is PP-complete.
The local Hamiltonian (LH) problem is the canonical $\mathsf{QMA}$-complete problem introduced by Kitaev. In this paper, we show its hardness in a very strong sense: we show that the 3-local Hamiltonian problem on $n$ qubits cannot be solved classically in time $O(2^{(1-\varepsilon)n})$ for any $\varepsilon>0$ under the Strong Exponential-Time Hypothesis (SETH), and cannot be solved quantumly in time $O(2^{(1-\varepsilon)n/2})$ for any $\varepsilon>0$ under the Quantum Strong Exponential-Time Hypothesis (QSETH). These lower bounds give evidence that the currently known classical and quantum algorithms for LH cannot be significantly improved. Furthermore, we are able to demonstrate fine-grained complexity lower bounds for approximating the quantum partition function (QPF) with an arbitrary constant relative error. Approximating QPF with relative error is known to be equivalent to approximately counting the dimension of the solution subspace of $\mathsf{QMA}$ problems. We show the SETH and QSETH hardness to estimate QPF with constant relative error. We then provide a quantum algorithm that runs in $O(\sqrt{2^n})$ time for an arbitrary $1/\mathrm{poly}(n)$ relative error, matching our lower bounds and improving the state-of-the-art algorithm by Bravyi, Chowdhury, Gosset, and Wocjan (Nature Physics 2022) in the low-temperature regime. To prove our fine-grained lower bounds, we introduce the first size-preserving circuit-to-Hamiltonian construction that encodes the computation of a $T$-time quantum circuit acting on $N$ qubits into a $(d+1)$-local Hamiltonian acting on $N+O(T^{1/d})$ qubits. This improves the standard construction based on the unary clock, which uses $N+O(T)$ qubits.
It is known that there exist multi-prover interactive protocols ($\mathsf{MIP}$ protocols) for the complexity class $\mathsf{NEXP}$, succinct $\mathsf{MIP}$ protocols for $\mathsf{NP}$ and multi-prover interactive protocols with shared entanglement ($\mathsf{MIP}^\ast$ protocols) for $\mathsf{RE}$. This extraordinary power of multi-prover interactive proof systems comes from the assumption that provers do not communicate with each other during the protocols. If they are allowed to communicate freely, the setting is the same as in the single-prover case, and the computational power of the system becomes significantly weaker. In this paper, we investigate for the first time the setting where communication (i.e., leakage of information) between provers is allowed but bounded. We introduce two techniques to approach this question and show that multi-prover interactive proof systems are robust against some amount of leakage. Our first technique is based on parallel repetition theorems. We apply it to show that for any polynomial $p$, we can construct two-prover one-round $\mathsf{MIP}$ and $\mathsf{MIP}^\ast$ protocols for $\mathsf{NEXP}$ and $\mathsf{RE}$, respectively, that are robust against $p(n)$ bits of leakage. We further derive our second technique to convert any low-soundness PCP construction to a two-prover one-round $\mathsf{MIP}$ protocol for $\mathsf{NP}$ robust against leakage. We also discuss the relation between robustness against leakage in multi-prover interactive proof systems and the Sliding Scale Conjecture in the PCP literature.
Driven by exploring the power of quantum computation with a limited number of qubits, we present a novel complete characterization for space-bounded quantum computation, which encompasses settings with one-sided error (unitary $\sf coRQL$) and two-sided error ($\sf BQL$), approached from a quantum state testing perspective: - The first family of natural complete problems for unitary $\sf coRQL$, namely space-bounded quantum state certification for trace distance and Hilbert-Schmidt distance; - A new family of natural complete problems for $\sf BQL$, namely space-bounded quantum state testing for trace distance, Hilbert-Schmidt distance, and (von Neumann) entropy difference. In the space-bounded quantum state testing problem, we consider two logarithmic-qubit quantum circuits (devices) denoted as $Q_0$ and $Q_1$, which prepare quantum states $ρ_0$ and $ρ_1$, respectively, with access to their ``source code''. Our goal is to decide whether $ρ_0$ is $ε_1$-close to or $ε_2$-far from $ρ_1$ with respect to a specified distance-like measure. Interestingly, unlike time-bounded state testing problems, which exhibit computational hardness depending on the chosen distance-like measure, our results reveal that the space-bounded state testing problems, considering all three measures, are computationally as easy as preparing quantum states. Our results primarily build upon a space-efficient variant of the quantum singular value transformation (QSVT) introduced by Gilyén, Su, Low, and Wiebe (STOC 2019), which is of independent interest. Our technique provides a unified approach for designing space-bounded quantum algorithms. Specifically, we show that implementing QSVT for any bounded polynomial that approximates a piecewise-smooth function incurs only a constant overhead in terms of the space required for special forms of the projected unitary encoding.
The complexity class Quantum Statistical Zero-Knowledge ($\mathsf{QSZK}$), introduced by Watrous (FOCS 2002) and later refined in Watrous (SICOMP, 2009), has the best known upper bound $\mathsf{QIP(2)} \cap \text{co-}\mathsf{QIP(2)}$, which was simplified following the inclusion $\mathsf{QIP(2)} \subseteq \mathsf{PSPACE}$ established in Jain, Upadhyay, and Watrous (FOCS 2009). Here, $\mathsf{QIP(2)}$ denotes the class of promise problems that admit two-message quantum interactive proof systems in which the honest prover is typically computationally unbounded, and $\text{co-}\mathsf{QIP(2)}$ denotes the complement of $\mathsf{QIP(2)}$. We slightly improve this upper bound to $\mathsf{QIP(2)} \cap \text{co-}\mathsf{QIP(2)}$ with a quantum linear-space honest prover. Specifically, the honest prover uses space linear in the size of the transcript of the original $\mathsf{QSZK}$ proof system. A similar improvement also applies to the upper bound for the non-interactive variant $\mathsf{NIQSZK}$. Our main techniques are algorithmic versions of the Holevo-Helstrom measurement and the Uhlmann transform, both implementable in quantum linear space, implying polynomial-time complexity in the state dimension, using the recent space-efficient quantum singular value transformation of Le Gall, Liu, and Wang (CC, to appear).
Low-energy estimation and state preparation for general $k$-local Hamiltonians are fundamental challenges in quantum complexity theory. For constant relative accuracy, Buhrman et al. (PRL 2025) recently broke the natural Grover bound $O(2^{n/2})$, where $n$ denotes the number of qubits, for both problems. In this paper, for any sufficiently small parameter $d\ge 0$, we present an even faster quantum algorithm that outputs a quantum state with energy bounded by the minimum energy over all depth-$d$ states (i.e., states obtained by applying a depth-$d$ circuit to the all-zero state), together with an estimate of this energy. For the class of Hamiltonians with depth-$d$ ground states, our algorithm furthermore achieves exactly the same energy guarantees as Buhrman et al. Our results also provide insight into the distinction between strongly entangled states and those admitting efficient classical descriptions.
We present relation problems whose input size is $n$ such that they can be solved with no communication for entanglement-assisted quantum communication models, but require $Ω(n)$ qubit communication for $2$-way quantum communication models without prior shared entanglement. This is the maximum separation of quantum communication complexity with and without shared entanglement. To our knowledge, our result even shows the first lower bound on quantum communication complexity without shared entanglement when the upper bound of entanglement-assisted quantum communication models is zero. Our result refutes a quantum analog of Newman's theorem. The problem we consider is parallel repetition of any non-local game which has a perfect quantum strategy and no perfect classical strategy, and for which a parallel repetition theorem holds with exponential decay.
The short-path quantum algorithm introduced by Hastings (Quantum 2018, 2019) is a variant of adiabatic quantum algorithms that enables an easier worst-case analysis by avoiding the need to control the spectral gap along a long adiabatic path. Dalzell, Pancotti, Campbell, and Brandão (STOC 2023) recently revisited this framework and obtained a clear analysis of the complexity of the short-path algorithm for several classes of constraint satisfaction problems (MAX-$k$-CSPs), leading to quantum algorithms with complexity $2^{(1-c)n/2}$ for some constant $c>0$. This suggested a super-quadratic quantum advantage over classical algorithms. In this work, we identify an explicit classical mechanism underlying a substantial part of this line of work, and show that it leads to clean dequantizations. As a consequence, we obtain classical algorithms that run in time $2^{(1-c')n}$, for some constant $c'>c$, for the same classes of constraint satisfaction problems. This shows that current short-path quantum algorithms for these problems do not achieve a super-quadratic advantage. On the positive side, our results provide a new ``quantum-inspired'' approach to designing classical algorithms for important classes of constraint satisfaction problems.
We connect three distinct lines of research that have recently explored extensions of the classical LOCAL model of distributed computing: A. distributed quantum computing and non-signaling distributions [e.g. STOC 2024], B. finitely-dependent processes [e.g. Forum Math. Pi 2016], and C. locality in online graph algorithms and dynamic graph algorithms [e.g. ICALP 2023]. We prove new results on the capabilities and limitations of all of these models of computing, for locally checkable labeling problems (LCLs). We show that all these settings can be sandwiched between the classical LOCAL model and what we call the randomized online-LOCAL model. Our work implies limitations on the quantum advantage in the distributed setting, and we also exhibit a new barrier for proving tighter bounds. Our main technical results are these: 1. All LCL problems solvable with locality $O(\log^\star n)$ in the classical deterministic LOCAL model admit a finitely-dependent distribution with locality $O(1)$. This answers an open question by Holroyd [2024], and also presents a new barrier for proving bounds on distributed quantum advantage using causality-based arguments. 2. In rooted trees, if we can solve an LCL problem with locality $o(\log \log \log n)$ in the randomized online-LOCAL model (or any of the weaker models, such as quantum-LOCAL), we can solve it with locality $O(\log^\star n)$ in the classical deterministic LOCAL model. One of many implications is that in rooted trees, $O(\log^\star n)$ locality in quantum-LOCAL is not stronger than $O(\log^\star n)$ locality in classical LOCAL.
In this work, we show that verifying the order of a finite group given as a black-box is in the complexity class QCMA. This solves an open problem asked by Watrous in 2000 in his seminal paper on quantum proofs and directly implies that the Group Non-Membership problem is also in the class QCMA, which further proves a conjecture proposed by Aaronson and Kuperberg in 2006. Our techniques also give improved quantum upper bounds on the complexity of many other group-theoretical problems, such as group isomorphism in black-box groups.
We study the algorithmic problem of multiplying large matrices that are rectangular. We prove that the method that has been used to construct the fastest algorithms for rectangular matrix multiplication cannot give algorithms with complexity $n^{p + 1}$ for $n \times n$ by $n \times n^p$ matrix multiplication. In fact, we prove a precise numerical barrier for this method. Our barrier improves the previously known barriers, both in the numerical sense, as well as in its generality. In particular, we prove that any lower bound on the dual exponent of matrix multiplication $α$ via the big Coppersmith-Winograd tensors cannot exceed 0.6218.
We present an extremely simple polynomial-space exponential-time $(1-\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm for MAX-k-SAT that is (slightly) faster than the previous known polynomial-space $(1-\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithms by Hirsch (Discrete Applied Mathematics, 2003) and Escoffier, Paschos and Tourniaire (Theoretical Computer Science, 2014). Our algorithm repeatedly samples an assignment uniformly at random until finding an assignment that satisfies a large enough fraction of clauses. Surprisingly, we can show the efficiency of this simpler approach by proving that in any instance of MAX-k-SAT (or more generally any instance of MAXCSP), an exponential number of assignments satisfy a fraction of clauses close to the optimal value.
We investigate how much quantum distributed algorithms can outperform classical distributed algorithms with respect to the message complexity (the overall amount of communication used by the algorithm). Recently, Dufoulon, Magniez and Pandurangan (PODC 2025) have shown a polynomial quantum advantage for several tasks such as leader election and agreement. In this paper, we show an exponential quantum advantage for a fundamental task: routing information between two specified nodes of a network. We prove that for the family of ``welded trees" introduced in the seminal work by Childs, Cleve, Deotto, Farhi, Gutmann and Spielman (STOC 2003), there exists a quantum distributed algorithm that transfers messages from the entrance of the graph to the exit with message complexity exponentially smaller than any classical algorithm. Our quantum algorithm is based on the recent "succinct" implementation of quantum walks over the welded trees by Li, Li and Luo (SODA 2024). Our classical lower bound is obtained by ``lifting'' the lower bound from Childs, Cleve, Deotto, Farhi, Gutmann and Spielman (STOC 2003) from query complexity to message complexity.