arXiv subjects

Jordi Weggemans

Publications and source records attributed to Jordi Weggemans.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Permutation tests for quantum state identity

The quantum analogue of the equality function, known as the quantum state identity problem, is the task of deciding whether $n$ unknown quantum states are equal or unequal, given the promise that all states are either pairwise orthogonal or identical. Under the one-sided error requirement, it is known that the permutation test is optimal for this task, and for two input states this coincides with the well-known Swap test. Until now, the optimal measurement in the general two-sided error regime was unknown. Under more specific promises, the problem can be solved approximately or even optimally with simpler tests, such as the circle test. This work attempts to capture the underlying structure of the quantum state identity problem. Using tools from semidefinite programming and representation theory, we (i) give an optimal test for any input distribution without the one-sided error requirement by writing the problem as an SDP, giving the exact solutions to the primal and dual programs and showing that the two values coincide; (ii) propose a general $G$-test which uses an arbitrary subgroup $G$ of $\text{S}_n$, giving an analytic expression of the performance of the specific test, and (iii) give an approximation of the permutation test using only a classical permutation and $n-1$ Swap tests.

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arXiv2026

Provable and Verifiable Quantum Advantage in Sample Complexity

Consider a fixed universe of $N=2^n$ elements and the uniform distribution over elements of some subset of size $K$. Given samples from this distribution, the task of complement sampling is to provide a sample from the complementary subset. We give a simple quantum algorithm that uses only a single quantum sample -- a single copy of the uniform superposition over elements of the subset. When $K=N/2$, we show that the quantum algorithm succeeds with probability $1$, whereas any classical algorithm that succeeds with bounded probability of error requires a number of samples of the order of $N$. This shows that in a sample-to-sample setting, quantum computation can achieve the largest possible separation over classical computation. We show that the same bound can be lifted to prove average-case hardness, paving the way for demonstrations on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers. It follows that under the assumption of the existence of one-way functions, complement sampling gives provable, verifiable and NISQable quantum advantage in a sample complexity setting.

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arXiv2026

Assessing fault-tolerant quantum advantage for $k$-SAT with structure

For many problems, quantum algorithms promise speedups over their classical counterparts. However, these results predominantly rely on asymptotic worst-case analysis, which overlooks significant overheads due to error correction and the fact that real-world instances often contain exploitable structure. In this work, we employ the hybrid benchmarking method to evaluate the potential of quantum Backtracking and Grover's algorithm against the 2023 SAT competition main track winner in solving random $k$-SAT instances with tunable structure, designed to represent industry-like scenarios, using both $T$-depth and $T$-count as cost metrics to estimate quantum run times. Our findings reproduce the results of Campbell, Khurana, and Montanaro (Quantum '19) in the unstructured case using hybrid benchmarking. However, we offer a more sobering perspective in practically relevant regimes: almost all quantum speedups vanish, even asymptotically, when minimal structure is introduced or when $T$-count is considered instead of $T$-depth. Moreover, when the requirement is for the algorithm to find a solution within a single day, we find that only Grover's algorithm has the potential to outperform classical algorithms, but only in a very limited regime and only when using $T$-depth. We also discuss how more sophisticated heuristics could restore the asymptotic scaling advantage for quantum backtracking, but our findings suggest that the potential for practical quantum speedups in more structured $k$-SAT solving will remain limited.

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arXiv2025

Unconditional and exponentially large violation of classicality

Testing the predictions of quantum mechanics has been one of the main experimental endeavors for decades. Recent advancements in technology led to a number of demonstrations which test non-classicality via specific computational tasks. Limitations of these experiments include dependence on complexity theory assumptions, susceptibility to hardware noise and inefficient verification, raising questions about their scalability. We propose to test non-classicality using a game based on complement sampling, an efficiently verifiable problem that achieves the largest possible separation between quantum and classical computation when both input and output represent samples from probability distributions. When restricting the input to instances inspired by the Bernstein-Vazirani problem, our game admits an exponentially large violation of classicality without relying on computational hardness assumptions. We execute the game on Quantinuum System Model H2 trapped-ion quantum computers, with experiments consisting of thousands of different circuits on up to 55 qubits. The observed scores can be explained by a systematic adoption of a quantum strategy, further corroborating the quantum nature of the hardware in an efficient and scalable way.

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arXiv2025

Quantum PCPs: on Adaptivity, Multiple Provers and Reductions to Local Hamiltonians

We define a general formulation of quantum PCPs, which captures adaptivity and multiple unentangled provers, and give a detailed construction of the quantum reduction to a local Hamiltonian with a constant promise gap. The reduction turns out to be a versatile subroutine to prove properties of quantum PCPs, allowing us to show: (i) Non-adaptive quantum PCPs can simulate adaptive quantum PCPs when the number of proof queries is constant. In fact, this can even be shown to hold when the non-adaptive quantum PCP picks the proof indices simply uniformly at random from a subset of all possible index combinations, answering an open question by Aharonov, Arad, Landau and Vazirani (STOC '09). (ii) If the $q$-local Hamiltonian problem with constant promise gap can be solved in $\mathsf{QCMA}$, then $\mathsf{QPCP}[q] \subseteq \mathsf{QCMA}$ for any $q \in O(1)$. (iii) If $\mathsf{QMA}(k)$ has a quantum PCP for any $k \leq \text{poly}(n)$, then $\mathsf{QMA}(2) = \mathsf{QMA}$, connecting two of the longest-standing open problems in quantum complexity theory. Moreover, we also show that there exist (quantum) oracles relative to which certain quantum PCP statements are false. Hence, any attempt to prove the quantum PCP conjecture requires, just as was the case for the classical PCP theorem, (quantumly) non-relativizing techniques.

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arXiv2025

Lower Bounds for Unitary Property Testing with Proofs and Advice

In unitary property testing a quantum algorithm, also known as a tester, is given query access to a black-box unitary and has to decide whether it satisfies some property. We propose a new technique for proving lower bounds on the quantum query complexity of unitary property testing and related problems, which utilises its connection to unitary channel discrimination. The main advantage of this technique is that all obtained lower bounds hold for any $\mathsf{C}$-tester with $\mathsf{C} \subseteq \mathsf{QMA}(2)/\mathsf{qpoly}$, showing that even having access to both (unentangled) quantum proofs and advice does not help for many unitary property testing problems. We apply our technique to prove lower bounds for problems like quantum phase estimation, the entanglement entropy problem, quantum Gibbs sampling and more, removing all logarithmic factors in the lower bounds obtained by the sample-to-query lifting theorem of Wang and Zhang (2023). As a direct corollary, we show that there exist quantum oracles relative to which $\mathsf{QMA}(2) \not\supset \mathsf{SBQP}$ and $\mathsf{QMA}/\mathsf{qpoly} \not\supset \mathsf{SBQP}$. The former shows that, at least in a black-box way, having unentangled quantum proofs does not help in solving problems that require high precision.

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arXiv2025

Finding quantum partial assignments by search-to-decision reductions

In computer science, many search problems are reducible to decision problems, which implies that finding a solution is as hard as deciding whether a solution exists. A quantum analogue of search-to-decision reductions would be to ask whether a quantum algorithm with access to a $\mathsf{QMA}$ oracle can construct $\mathsf{QMA}$ witnesses as quantum states. By a result from Irani, Natarajan, Nirkhe, Rao, and Yuen (CCC '22), it is known that this does not hold relative to a quantum oracle, unlike the cases of $\mathsf{NP}$, $\mathsf{MA}$, and $\mathsf{QCMA}$ where search-to-decision relativizes. We prove that if one is not interested in the quantum witness as a quantum state but only in terms of its partial assignments, i.e. the reduced density matrices, then there exists a classical polynomial-time algorithm with access to a $\mathsf{QMA}$ oracle that outputs approximations of the density matrices of a near-optimal quantum witness, for any desired constant locality and inverse polynomial error. Our construction is based on a circuit-to-Hamiltonian mapping that approximately preserves near-optimal $\mathsf{QMA}$ witnesses and a new $\mathsf{QMA}$-complete problem, Low-energy Density Matrix Verification, which is called by the $\mathsf{QMA}$ oracle to adaptively construct approximately consistent density matrices of a low-energy state.

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arXiv2024

Classical versus quantum queries in quantum PCPs with classical proofs

We generalize quantum-classical PCPs, first introduced by Weggemans, Folkertsma and Cade (TQC 2024), to allow for $q$ quantum queries to a polynomially-sized classical proof ($\mathsf{QCPCP}_{Q,c,s}[q]$). Exploiting a connection with the polynomial method, we prove that for any constant $q$, promise gap $c-s = Ω(1/\text{poly}(n))$ and $δ>0$, we have $\mathsf{QCPCP}_{Q,c,s}[q] \subseteq \mathsf{QCPCP}_{1-δ,1/2+δ}[3] \subseteq \mathsf{BQ} \cdot \mathsf{NP}$, where $\mathsf{BQ} \cdot \mathsf{NP}$ is the class of promise problems with quantum reductions to an $\mathsf{NP}$-complete problem. Surprisingly, this shows that we can amplify the promise gap from inverse polynomial to constant for constant query quantum-classical PCPs, and that any quantum-classical PCP making any constant number of quantum queries can be simulated by one that makes only three classical queries. Nevertheless, even though we can achieve promise gap amplification, our result also gives strong evidence that there exists no constant query quantum-classical PCP for $\mathsf{QCMA}$, as it is unlikely that $\mathsf{QCMA} \subseteq \mathsf{BQ} \cdot \mathsf{NP}$, which we support by giving oracular evidence. In the (poly-)logarithmic query regime, we show for any positive integer $c$, there exists an oracle relative to which $\mathsf{QCPCP}[\mathcal{O}(\log^c n)] \subsetneq \mathsf{QCPCP}_Q[\mathcal{O}(\log^c n)]$, contrasting the constant query case where the equivalence of both query models holds relative to any oracle. Finally, we connect our results to more general quantum-classical interactive proof systems.

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arXiv2024

Guidable Local Hamiltonian Problems with Implications to Heuristic Ansätze State Preparation and the Quantum PCP Conjecture

We study 'Merlinized' versions of the recently defined Guided Local Hamiltonian problem, which we call 'Guidable Local Hamiltonian' problems. Unlike their guided counterparts, these problems do not have a guiding state provided as a part of the input, but merely come with the promise that one exists. We consider in particular two classes of guiding states: those that can be prepared efficiently by a quantum circuit; and those belonging to a class of quantum states we call classically evaluatable, for which it is possible to efficiently compute expectation values of local observables classically. We show that guidable local Hamiltonian problems for both classes of guiding states are $\mathsf{QCMA}$-complete in the inverse-polynomial precision setting, but lie within $\mathsf{NP}$ (or $\mathsf{NqP}$) in the constant precision regime when the guiding state is classically evaluatable. Our completeness results show that, from a complexity-theoretic perspective, classical Ansätze selected by classical heuristics are just as powerful as quantum Ansätze prepared by quantum heuristics, as long as one has access to quantum phase estimation. In relation to the quantum PCP conjecture, we (i) define a complexity class capturing quantum-classical probabilistically checkable proof systems and show that it is contained in $\mathsf{BQP}^{\mathsf{NP}[1]}$ for constant proof queries; (ii) give a no-go result on 'dequantizing' the known quantum reduction which maps a $\mathsf{QPCP}$-verification circuit to a local Hamiltonian with constant promise gap; (iii) give several no-go results for the existence of quantum gap amplification procedures that preserve certain ground state properties; and (iv) propose two conjectures that can be viewed as stronger versions of the NLTS theorem. Finally, we show that many of our results can be directly modified to obtain similar results for the class $\mathsf{MA}$.

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arXiv2024

Complexity of the Guided Local Hamiltonian Problem: Improved Parameters and Extension to Excited States

Recently it was shown that the so-called guided local Hamiltonian problem -- estimating the smallest eigenvalue of a $k$-local Hamiltonian when provided with a description of a quantum state ('guiding state') that is guaranteed to have substantial overlap with the true groundstate -- is BQP-complete for $k \geq 6$ when the required precision is inverse polynomial in the system size $n$, and remains hard even when the overlap of the guiding state with the groundstate is close to a constant $\left(\frac12 - Ω\left(\frac{1}{\mathop{poly}(n)}\right)\right)$. We improve upon this result in three ways: by showing that it remains BQP-complete when i) the Hamiltonian is 2-local, ii) the overlap between the guiding state and target eigenstate is as large as $1 - Ω\left(\frac{1}{\mathop{poly}(n)}\right)$, and iii) when one is interested in estimating energies of excited states, rather than just the groundstate. Interestingly, iii) is only made possible by first showing that ii) holds.

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arXiv2024

Improved Hardness Results for the Guided Local Hamiltonian Problem

Estimating the ground state energy of a local Hamiltonian is a central problem in quantum chemistry. In order to further investigate its complexity and the potential of quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry, Gharibian and Le Gall (STOC 2022) recently introduced the guided local Hamiltonian problem (GLH), which is a variant of the local Hamiltonian problem where an approximation of a ground state (which is called a guiding state) is given as an additional input. Gharibian and Le Gall showed quantum advantage (more precisely, BQP-completeness) for GLH with $6$-local Hamiltonians when the guiding state has fidelity (inverse-polynomially) close to $1/2$ with a ground state. In this paper, we optimally improve both the locality and the fidelity parameter: we show that the BQP-completeness persists even with 2-local Hamiltonians, and even when the guiding state has fidelity (inverse-polynomially) close to 1 with a ground state. Moreover, we show that the BQP-completeness also holds for 2-local physically motivated Hamiltonians on a 2D square lattice or a 2D triangular lattice. Beyond the hardness of estimating the ground state energy, we also show BQP-hardness persists when considering estimating energies of excited states of these Hamiltonians instead. Those make further steps towards establishing practical quantum advantage in quantum chemistry.

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arXiv2023

Quantifying Grover speed-ups beyond asymptotic analysis

Run-times of quantum algorithms are often studied via an asymptotic, worst-case analysis. Whilst useful, such a comparison can often fall short: it is not uncommon for algorithms with a large worst-case run-time to end up performing well on instances of practical interest. To remedy this it is necessary to resort to run-time analyses of a more empirical nature, which for sufficiently small input sizes can be performed on a quantum device or a simulation thereof. For larger input sizes, alternative approaches are required. In this paper we consider an approach that combines classical emulation with detailed complexity bounds that include all constants. We simulate quantum algorithms by running classical versions of the sub-routines, whilst simultaneously collecting information about what the run-time of the quantum routine would have been if it were run instead. To do this accurately and efficiently for very large input sizes, we describe an estimation procedure and prove that it obtains upper bounds on the true expected complexity of the quantum algorithms. We apply our method to some simple quantum speedups of classical heuristic algorithms for solving the well-studied MAX-$k$-SAT optimization problem. This requires rigorous bounds (including all constants) on the expected- and worst-case complexities of two important quantum sub-routines: Grover search with an unknown number of marked items, and quantum maximum-finding. These improve upon existing results and might be of broader interest. Amongst other results, we found that the classical heuristic algorithms we studied did not offer significant quantum speedups despite the existence of a theoretical per-step speedup. This suggests that an empirical analysis such as the one we implement in this paper already yields insights beyond those that can be seen by an asymptotic analysis alone.

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arXiv2022

Quantum Algorithms for Community Detection and their Empirical Run-times

We apply our recent work on empirical estimates of quantum speedups to the practical task of community detection in complex networks. We design several quantum variants of a popular classical algorithm -- the Louvain algorithm for community detection -- and first study their complexities in the usual way, before analysing their complexities empirically across a variety of artificial and real inputs. We find that this analysis yields insights not available to us via the asymptotic analysis, further emphasising the utility in such an empirical approach. In particular, we observe that a complicated quantum algorithm with a large asymptotic speedup might not be the fastest algorithm in practice, and that a simple quantum algorithm with a modest speedup might in fact be the one that performs best. Moreover, we repeatedly find that overheads such as those arising from the need to amplify the success probabilities of quantum sub-routines such as Grover search can nullify any speedup that might have been suggested by a theoretical worst- or expected-case analysis.

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