arXiv subjects

Harold Nieuwboer

Publications and source records attributed to Harold Nieuwboer.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

On quantum functionals for higher-order tensors

Upper and lower quantum functionals, introduced by Christandl, Vrana and Zuiddam (STOC 2018, J. Amer. Math. Soc. 2023), are families of monotone functions of tensors indexed by a weighting on the set of subsets of the tensor legs. Inspired by quantum information theory, they were crafted as obstructions to asymptotic tensor transformations, relevant in algebraic complexity theory. For tensors of order three, and more generally for weightings on singletons for higher-order tensors, the upper and lower quantum functionals coincide and are spectral points in Strassen's asymptotic spectrum. Moreover, the singleton quantum functionals characterize the asymptotic slice rank, whereas general weightings provide upper bounds on asymptotic partition rank. It has been an open question whether the upper and lower quantum functionals also coincide for other cases, or more generally, how to construct further spectral points, especially for higher-order tensors. In this work, we show that upper and lower quantum functionals generally do not coincide, but that they anchor new spectral points. With this we mean that there exist new spectral points, which equal the quantum functionals on the set of tensors on which upper and lower coincide. The set is shown to include embedded three-tensors and W-like states and concerns all laminar weightings, significantly extending the singleton case. Moreover, it is shown that these spectral points provide obstructions to asymptotic restriction beyond the previously known spectral points.

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arXiv2026

Robustness of Hidden-Variable Theories and Matrix Scaling

Motivated by quantum foundations and complexity theory, Aaronson formalized a hidden-variable theory inspired by a proposal by Schrödinger. To any quantum state and unitary, this Schrödinger theory assigns a joint probability distribution via the Sinkhorn algorithm: rescale the columns and rows of the entrywise modulus of the unitary so that the marginals match the Born rule for the initial and final quantum states, respectively. He conjectured that this map is robust, i.e., inverse polynomially small perturbations in the inputs lead to inverse polynomially small perturbations of the joint distribution, which is important for complexity theoretic applications. We present a counterexample to this conjecture: We construct a pure state and two unitaries that are exponentially close, yet the joint probability distributions assigned by the Schrödinger theory differ by at least an inverse-linear term in at least one entry, and by a constant in total variation distance. We also propose a modified version of Schrödinger's theory that satisfies robustness, while retaining all of its other desirable properties. This yields a complete picture of which axioms of Aaronson can be simultaneously satisfied by hidden-variable theories.

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arXiv2026

Asymptotic tensor rank is characterized by polynomials

Asymptotic tensor rank is notoriously difficult to determine. Indeed, determining its value for the $2\times 2$ matrix multiplication tensor would determine the matrix multiplication exponent, a long-standing open problem. On the other hand, Strassen's asymptotic rank conjecture makes the bold claim that asymptotic tensor rank equals the largest dimension of the tensor and is thus as easy to compute as matrix rank. Despite tremendous interest, much is still unknown about the structural and computational properties of asymptotic rank; for instance whether it is computable. We prove that asymptotic tensor rank is "computable from above", that is, for any real number $r$ there is an (efficient) algorithm that determines, given a tensor $T$, if the asymptotic tensor rank of $T$ is at most $r$. The algorithm has a simple structure; it consists of evaluating a finite list of polynomials on the tensor. Indeed, we prove that the sublevel sets of asymptotic rank are Zariski-closed (just like matrix rank). While we do not exhibit these polynomials explicitly, their mere existence has strong implications on the structure of asymptotic rank. As one such implication, we find that the values that asymptotic tensor rank takes, on all tensors, is a well-ordered set. In other words, any non-increasing sequence of asymptotic ranks stabilizes ("discreteness from above"). In particular, for the matrix multiplication exponent (which is an asymptotic rank) there is no sequence of exponents of bilinear maps that approximates it arbitrarily closely from above without being eventually constant. In other words, any such upper bound on the matrix multiplication exponent that is close enough, will "snap" to it. Previously such discreteness results were only known for finite fields or for other tensor parameters (e.g., asymptotic slice rank). We obtain them for infinite fields like the complex numbers.

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arXiv2026

Negative curvature obstructs the existence of good barriers for interior-point methods

Interior-point methods (IPMs) are a cornerstone of Euclidean convex optimization, due to their strong theoretical guarantees and practical performance. Motivated by scaling problems, recent work by Hirai and the last two authors (FOCS'23) extended IPMs to geodesically convex optimization on Hadamard manifolds. Crucially, the complexity of IPMs (both in Euclidean and Hadamard spaces) is governed by the \emph{barrier parameter} of the domain. Here we prove that already in hyperbolic space, several natural domains -- including geodesic balls and triangles -- have a barrier parameter that grows polynomially with the domain's diameter. By extension, the same holds for the positive-definite matrices and other symmetric Hadamard spaces. This growth implies a fundamental limitation: interior-point methods relying on barriers for a ball cannot efficiently solve challenging scaling problems, such as tensor scaling, where the domain's diameter can be exponentially large in the input size. Our results are partially inspired by, and complement, lower bounds on the condition number of geodesically convex functions established by Hamilton and Moitra (NeurIPS'21).

math.OC↗

arXiv2025

Computing moment polytopes -- with a focus on tensors, entanglement and matrix multiplication

Tensors are fundamental in mathematics, computer science, and physics. Their study through algebraic geometry and representation theory has proved very fruitful in the context of algebraic complexity theory and quantum information. In particular, moment polytopes have been understood to play a key role. In quantum information, moment polytopes (also known as entanglement polytopes) provide a framework for the single-particle quantum marginal problem and offer a geometric characterization of entanglement. In algebraic complexity, they underpin quantum functionals that capture asymptotic tensor relations. More recently, moment polytopes have also become foundational to the emerging field of scaling algorithms in computer science and optimization. Despite their fundamental role and interest from many angles, much is still unknown about these polytopes, and in particular for tensors beyond $\mathbb{C}^2\otimes\mathbb{C}^2\otimes\mathbb{C}^2$ and $\mathbb{C}^2\otimes\mathbb{C}^2\otimes\mathbb{C}^2\otimes\mathbb{C}^2$ only sporadically have they been computed. We give a new algorithm for computing moment polytopes of tensors (and in fact moment polytopes for the general class of reductive algebraic groups) based on a mathematical description by Franz (J. Lie Theory 2002). This algorithm enables us to compute moment polytopes of tensors of dimension an order of magnitude larger than previous methods, allowing us to compute with certainty, for the first time, all moment polytopes of tensors in $\mathbb{C}^3\otimes\mathbb{C}^3\otimes\mathbb{C}^3$, and with high probability those in $\mathbb{C}^4\otimes\mathbb{C}^4\otimes\mathbb{C}^4$ (which includes the $2\times 2$ matrix multiplication tensor). We discuss how these explicit moment polytopes have led to several new theoretical directions and results.

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arXiv2025

Self-concordant Schrödinger operators: spectral gaps and optimization without condition numbers

Spectral gaps play a fundamental role in many areas of mathematics, computer science, and physics. In quantum mechanics, the spectral gap of Schrödinger operators has a long history of study due to its physical relevance, while in quantum computing spectral gaps are an important proxy for efficiency, such as in the quantum adiabatic algorithm. Motivated by convex optimization, we study Schrödinger operators associated with self-concordant barriers over convex domains and prove non-asymptotic lower bounds on the spectral gap for this class of operators. Significantly, we find that the spectral gap does not display any condition-number dependence when the usual Laplacian is replaced by the Laplace--Beltrami operator, which uses second-order information of the barrier and hence can take the curvature of the barrier into account. As an algorithmic application, we construct a novel quantum interior point method that applies to arbitrary self-concordant barriers and shows no condition-number dependence. To achieve this we combine techniques from semiclassical analysis, convex optimization, and quantum annealing.

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arXiv2025

The moment polytope of matrix multiplication is not maximal

Moment polytopes of tensors, the study of which is deeply rooted in invariant theory, representation theory and symplectic geometry, have found relevance in numerous places, from quantum information (entanglement polytopes) and algebraic complexity theory (GCT program and the complexity of matrix multiplication) to optimization (scaling algorithms). Towards an open problem in algebraic complexity theory, we prove separations between the moment polytopes of matrix multiplication tensors and unit tensors. As a consequence, we find that matrix multiplication moment polytopes are not maximal, i.e. are strictly contained in the corresponding Kronecker polytope. As another consequence, we obtain a no-go result for a natural operational characterization of moment polytope inclusion in terms of asymptotic restriction. We generalize the separation and non-maximality to moment polytopes of iterated matrix multiplication tensors. Our result implies that tensor networks where multipartite entanglement structures beyond two-party entanglement are allowed can go beyond projected entangled-pair states (PEPS) in terms of expressivity. Our proof characterizes membership of uniform points in moment polytopes of tensors, and establishes a connection to polynomial multiplication tensors via the minrank of matrix subspaces. As a result of independent interest, we extend these techniques to obtain a new proof of the optimal border subrank bound for matrix multiplication.

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arXiv2025

Explicit non-free tensors

Free tensors are tensors which, after a change of bases, have free support: any two distinct elements of its support differ in at least two coordinates. They play a distinguished role in the theory of bilinear complexity, in particular in Strassen's duality theory for asymptotic rank. Within the context of quantum information theory, where tensors are interpreted as multiparticle quantum states, freeness corresponds to a type of multiparticle Schmidt decomposition. In particular, if a state is free in a given basis, the reduced density matrices are diagonal. Although generic tensors in $\mathbb{C}^n \otimes \mathbb{C}^n \otimes \mathbb{C}^n$ are non-free for $n \geq 4$ by parameter counting, no explicit non-free tensors were known until now. We solve this hay in a haystack problem by constructing explicit tensors that are non-free for every $n \geq 3$. In particular, this establishes that non-free tensors exist in $\mathbb{C}^n \otimes \mathbb{C}^n \otimes \mathbb{C}^n$, where they are not generic. To establish non-freeness, we use results from geometric invariant theory and the theory of moment polytopes. In particular, we show that if a tensor $T$ is free, then there is a tensor $S$ in the GL-orbit closure of $T$, whose support is free and whose moment map image is the minimum-norm point of the moment polytope of $T$. This implies a reduction for checking non-freeness from arbitrary basis changes of $T$ to unitary basis changes of $S$. The unitary equivariance of the moment map can then be combined with the fact that tensors with free support have diagonal moment map image, in order to further restrict the set of relevant basis changes.

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arXiv2024

Basic quantum subroutines: finding multiple marked elements and summing numbers

We show how to find all $k$ marked elements in a list of size $N$ using the optimal number $O(\sqrt{N k})$ of quantum queries and only a polylogarithmic overhead in the gate complexity, in the setting where one has a small quantum memory. Previous algorithms either incurred a factor $k$ overhead in the gate complexity, or had an extra factor $\log(k)$ in the query complexity. We then consider the problem of finding a multiplicative $δ$-approximation of $s = \sum_{i=1}^N v_i$ where $v=(v_i) \in [0,1]^N$, given quantum query access to a binary description of $v$. We give an algorithm that does so, with probability at least $1-ρ$, using $O(\sqrt{N \log(1/ρ) / δ})$ quantum queries (under mild assumptions on $ρ$). This quadratically improves the dependence on $1/δ$ and $\log(1/ρ)$ compared to a straightforward application of amplitude estimation. To obtain the improved $\log(1/ρ)$ dependence we use the first result.

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arXiv2023

Interior-point methods on manifolds: theory and applications

Interior-point methods offer a highly versatile framework for convex optimization that is effective in theory and practice. A key notion in their theory is that of a self-concordant barrier. We give a suitable generalization of self-concordance to Riemannian manifolds and show that it gives the same structural results and guarantees as in the Euclidean setting, in particular local quadratic convergence of Newton's method. We analyze a path-following method for optimizing compatible objectives over a convex domain for which one has a self-concordant barrier, and obtain the standard complexity guarantees as in the Euclidean setting. We provide general constructions of barriers, and show that on the space of positive-definite matrices and other symmetric spaces, the squared distance to a point is self-concordant. To demonstrate the versatility of our framework, we give algorithms with state-of-the-art complexity guarantees for the general class of scaling and non-commutative optimization problems, which have been of much recent interest, and we provide the first algorithms for efficiently finding high-precision solutions for computing minimal enclosing balls and geometric medians in nonpositive curvature.

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arXiv2022

The minimal canonical form of a tensor network

Tensor networks have a gauge degree of freedom on the virtual degrees of freedom that are contracted. A canonical form is a choice of fixing this degree of freedom. For matrix product states, choosing a canonical form is a powerful tool, both for theoretical and numerical purposes. On the other hand, for tensor networks in dimension two or greater there is only limited understanding of the gauge symmetry. Here we introduce a new canonical form, the minimal canonical form, which applies to projected entangled pair states (PEPS) in any dimension, and prove a corresponding fundamental theorem. Already for matrix product states this gives a new canonical form, while in higher dimensions it is the first rigorous definition of a canonical form valid for any choice of tensor. We show that two tensors have the same minimal canonical forms if and only if they are gauge equivalent up to taking limits; moreover, this is the case if and only if they give the same quantum state for any geometry. In particular, this implies that the latter problem is decidable - in contrast to the well-known undecidability for PEPS on grids. We also provide rigorous algorithms for computing minimal canonical forms. To achieve this we draw on geometric invariant theory and recent progress in theoretical computer science in non-commutative group optimization.

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arXiv2021

Improved quantum lower and upper bounds for matrix scaling

Matrix scaling is a simple to state, yet widely applicable linear-algebraic problem: the goal is to scale the rows and columns of a given non-negative matrix such that the rescaled matrix has prescribed row and column sums. Motivated by recent results on first-order quantum algorithms for matrix scaling, we investigate the possibilities for quantum speedups for classical second-order algorithms, which comprise the state-of-the-art in the classical setting. We first show that there can be essentially no quantum speedup in terms of the input size in the high-precision regime: any quantum algorithm that solves the matrix scaling problem for $n \times n$ matrices with at most $m$ non-zero entries and with $\ell_2$-error $\varepsilon=\widetildeΘ(1/m)$ must make $\widetildeΩ(m)$ queries to the matrix, even when the success probability is exponentially small in $n$. Additionally, we show that for $\varepsilon\in[1/n,1/2]$, any quantum algorithm capable of producing $\frac{\varepsilon}{100}$-$\ell_1$-approximations of the row-sum vector of a (dense) normalized matrix uses $Ω(n/\varepsilon)$ queries, and that there exists a constant $\varepsilon_0>0$ for which this problem takes $Ω(n^{1.5})$ queries. To complement these results we give improved quantum algorithms in the low-precision regime: with quantum graph sparsification and amplitude estimation, a box-constrained Newton method can be sped up in the large-$\varepsilon$ regime, and outperforms previous quantum algorithms. For entrywise-positive matrices, we find an $\varepsilon$-$\ell_1$-scaling in time $\widetilde O(n^{1.5}/\varepsilon^2)$, whereas the best previously known bounds were $\widetilde O(n^2\mathrm{polylog}(1/\varepsilon))$ (classical) and $\widetilde O(n^{1.5}/\varepsilon^3)$ (quantum).

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

Quantum algorithms for matrix scaling and matrix balancing

Matrix scaling and matrix balancing are two basic linear-algebraic problems with a wide variety of applications, such as approximating the permanent, and pre-conditioning linear systems to make them more numerically stable. We study the power and limitations of quantum algorithms for these problems. We provide quantum implementations of two classical (in both senses of the word) methods: Sinkhorn's algorithm for matrix scaling and Osborne's algorithm for matrix balancing. Using amplitude estimation as our main tool, our quantum implementations both run in time $\tilde O(\sqrt{mn}/\varepsilon^4)$ for scaling or balancing an $n \times n$ matrix (given by an oracle) with $m$ non-zero entries to within $\ell_1$-error $\varepsilon$. Their classical analogs use time $\tilde O(m/\varepsilon^2)$, and every classical algorithm for scaling or balancing with small constant $\varepsilon$ requires $Ω(m)$ queries to the entries of the input matrix. We thus achieve a polynomial speed-up in terms of $n$, at the expense of a worse polynomial dependence on the obtained $\ell_1$-error $\varepsilon$. We emphasize that even for constant $\varepsilon$ these problems are already non-trivial (and relevant in applications). Along the way, we extend the classical analysis of Sinkhorn's and Osborne's algorithm to allow for errors in the computation of marginals. We also adapt an improved analysis of Sinkhorn's algorithm for entrywise-positive matrices to the $\ell_1$-setting, leading to an $\tilde O(n^{1.5}/\varepsilon^3)$-time quantum algorithm for $\varepsilon$-$\ell_1$-scaling in this case. We also prove a lower bound, showing that our quantum algorithm for matrix scaling is essentially optimal for constant $\varepsilon$: every quantum algorithm for matrix scaling that achieves a constant $\ell_1$-error with respect to uniform marginals needs to make at least $Ω(\sqrt{mn})$ queries.

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arXiv2020

Interior-point methods for unconstrained geometric programming and scaling problems

We provide a condition-based analysis of two interior-point methods for unconstrained geometric programs, a class of convex programs that arise naturally in applications including matrix scaling, matrix balancing, and entropy maximization. Our condition numbers are natural geometric quantities associated with the Newton polytope of the geometric program, and lead to diameter bounds on approximate minimizers. We also provide effective bounds on the condition numbers both in general and under combinatorial assumptions on the Newton polytope. In this way, we generalize the iteration complexity of recent interior-point methods for matrix scaling and matrix balancing. Recently, there has been much work on algorithms for certain optimization problems on Lie groups, known as capacity and scaling problems. For commutative groups, these problems reduce to unconstrained geometric programs, which serves as a particular source of motivation for our work.

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