arXiv subjects

Zhijian Lai

Publications and source records attributed to Zhijian Lai.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Human-AI Collaborative Workflow for Mathematical Discovery: A Case Study in Grover-Compatible Riemannian Optimization

We investigate how large language models can be used as research tools in scientific computing while preserving mathematical rigor. We propose a human-in-the-loop workflow for interactive theorem proving and discovery with LLMs. Human experts retain control over problem formulation and assumptions, while the model searches for proofs or contradictions, proposes candidate properties and theorems, and helps construct structures and parameters that satisfy explicit constraints, supported by numerical experiments and simple verification checks. Experts treat these outputs as raw material, further refine them, and organize the results into precise statements and rigorous proofs. We instantiate this workflow in a main case study on the connection between manifold optimization and Grover's quantum search algorithm, where the pipeline identifies invariant subspaces and explores Grover-compatible retractions. The main case study uses the corresponding Grover-compatible convergence analysis, including an $O(\sqrt{N} \log(1/\varepsilon))$ PL-based bound established in the companion mathematical work, to illustrate the refinement stage of the workflow. Prompt records and reusable templates for implementing the workflow are provided. We further include a multi-oracle case study, document representative failed and corrected routes arising from this setting, and provide a structured failure-mode analysis.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Retraction-Free Optimization over the Stiefel Manifold for the LoRA Fine-Tuning

Optimization over the Stiefel manifold plays a significant role in various machine learning tasks. Existing methods either use the retraction operators, requiring costly orthonormalization for large-scale matrices, or employ landing methods that rely on careful step size selection and penalty parameter tuning. To address these challenges, we propose a retraction-free and penalty parameter-free algorithm that directly lands on the manifold. By leveraging the strongly-convex-like property of the quadratic penalty function and the proximal smoothness of the Stiefel manifold, we establish global convergence guarantees with the best-known iteration complexities under both constant and diminishing step sizes. Then, we reformulate the low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning problem for large language models as a manifold optimization problem, introducing Manifold-LoRA for geometry-accelerated adaptation. This approach employs the proposed landing technique and a carefully designed step size strategy to accelerate the training process. Numerical experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficiency and strong downstream performance of the proposed method.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Achieving double-logarithmic precision dependence in optimization-based quantum unstructured search

Grover's algorithm is a fundamental quantum algorithm that achieves a quadratic speedup for unstructured search problems of size $N$. Recent studies have reformulated this task as a maximization problem on the unitary manifold and solved it via linearly convergent Riemannian gradient ascent (RGA) methods, resulting in a complexity of $O(\sqrt{N/M}\log (1/\varepsilon))$, where $M$ denotes the number of target items and $\varepsilon$ denotes the success probability error. In this work, we adopt the Riemannian modified Newton (RMN) method to solve the quantum search problem, under the assumption that the ratio $ M/N$ is known. We show that, in this setting, the Riemannian Newton direction is collinear with the Riemannian gradient in the sense that the Riemannian gradient is always an eigenvector of the corresponding Riemannian Hessian. This structure removes the overhead of Hessian inversion and allows the proposed RMN method to retain the local quadratic convergence in terms of the error $\varepsilon$. More precisely, we rigorously prove an overall complexity of $O(\sqrt{N/M}+\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$. Furthermore, our approach remains Grover-compatible, namely, it relies exclusively on the standard Grover diffusion and oracle operators to ensure algorithmic implementability, and its parameter update process can be efficiently precomputed on classical computers.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

A Grover-compatible manifold optimization algorithm for quantum search

Grover's algorithm is a fundamental quantum algorithm that offers a quadratic speedup for the unstructured search problem by alternately applying physically implementable oracle and diffusion operators. In this paper, we reformulate the unstructured search as a maximization problem on the unitary manifold and solve it via the Riemannian gradient ascent (RGA) method. To overcome the difficulty that generic RGA updates do not, in general, correspond to physically implementable quantum operators, we introduce Grover-compatible retractions to restrict RGA updates to valid oracle and diffusion operators. Theoretically, we establish a local Riemannian $μ$-Polyak-Łojasiewicz (PL) inequality with $μ= \tfrac{1}{2}$, which yields a linear convergence rate of $1 - κ^{-1}$ toward the global solution. Here, the condition number $κ= L_{\mathrm{Rie}} / μ$, where $L_{\mathrm{Rie}}$ denotes the Riemannian Lipschitz constant of the gradient. Taking into account both the geometry of the unitary manifold and the special structure of the cost function, we show that $L_{\mathrm{Rie}} = O(\sqrt{N})$ for problem size $N = 2^n$. Consequently, the resulting iteration complexity is $O(\sqrt{N} \log(1/\varepsilon))$ for attaining an $\varepsilon$-accurate solution, which matches the quadratic speedup of $O(\sqrt{N})$ achieved by Grover's algorithm. These results demonstrate that an optimization-based viewpoint can offer fresh conceptual insights and lead to new advances in the design of quantum algorithms.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Pauli-structured preconditioning for quantum linear system solvers

Preconditioning is a fundamental technique for accelerating classical linear system solvers, and understanding when its benefits persist in quantum linear system (QLS) solvers is important for assessing the practical resource requirements of quantum linear algebra. In QLS algorithms, however, the potential advantage of preconditioning may be offset by the normalization overhead incurred by composing separate block-encodings of the system matrix and the preconditioner, as observed in recent work. This limitation leaves open whether additional algebraic structure can make preconditioning effective in quantum access models. Motivated by this question, we show that Pauli-structured representations of both the system matrix and the preconditioner allow the preconditioned operator to be accessed through regrouped Pauli expansions. In this setting, algebraic regrouping of Pauli products can reduce the Pauli coefficient weight of the preconditioned operator, thereby altering the normalization parameters relevant to quantum algorithms. We derive explicit size and coefficient-weight bounds for the regrouped Pauli representations, and we trace their consequences for both direct block-encoding constructions and randomized Pauli linear system solvers. These results identify when Pauli-structured preconditioning can reduce the effective complexity parameters of QLS algorithms, rather than merely improving the classical condition number. Numerical experiments on a finite-dimensional synthetic benchmark show reductions in norm-aware direct block-encoding diagnostics and in the randomized QLS per-sample depth proxy.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Quantum circuit design from a retraction-based Riemannian optimization framework

Designing quantum circuits for ground state preparation is a fundamental task in quantum information science. However, standard Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) are often constrained by limited ansatz expressivity and difficult optimization landscapes. To address these issues, we adopt a geometric perspective, formulating the problem as the minimization of an energy cost function directly over the unitary group. We establish a retraction-based Riemannian optimization framework for this setting, ensuring that all algorithmic procedures are implementable on quantum hardware. Within this framework, we unify existing randomized gradient approaches under a Riemannian Random Subspace Gradient Projection (RRSGP) method. While recent geometric approaches have predominantly focused on such first-order gradient descent techniques, efficient second-order methods remain unexplored. To bridge this gap, we derive explicit expressions for the Riemannian Hessian and show that it can be estimated directly on quantum hardware via parameter-shift rules. Building on this, we propose the Riemannian Random Subspace Newton (RRSN) method, a scalable second-order algorithm that constructs a Newton system from measurement data. Numerical simulations indicate that RRSN achieves quadratic convergence, yielding high-precision ground states in significantly fewer iterations compared to both existing first-order approaches and standard VQA baselines. Ultimately, this work provides a systematic foundation for applying a broader class of efficient Riemannian algorithms to quantum circuit design.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Extended parameter shift rules with minimal derivative variance for parameterized quantum circuits

Parameter shift rules (PSRs) are useful methods for computing arbitrary-order derivatives of the cost function in parameterized quantum circuits. The basic idea of PSRs is to evaluate the cost function at different parameter shifts, then use specific coefficients to combine them linearly to obtain the exact derivatives. In this work, we propose an extended parameter shift rule (EPSR) which generalizes a broad range of existing PSRs and has the following two advantages. First, EPSR offers an infinite number of possible parameter shifts, allowing the selection of the optimal parameter shifts to minimize the final derivative variance and thereby obtaining the more accurate derivative estimates with limited quantum resources. Second, EPSR extends the scope of the PSRs in the sense that EPSR can handle arbitrary Hermitian operator $H$ in gate $U(x) = \exp (iHx)$ in the parameterized quantum circuits, while existing PSRs are valid only for simple Hermitian generators $H$ such as simple Pauli words. Additionally, we show that the widely used ``general PSR'', introduced by Wierichs et al. (2022), is a special case of our EPSR, and we prove that it yields globally optimal shifts for minimizing the derivative variance under the weighted-shot scheme. Finally, through numerical simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of EPSR and show that the usage of the optimal parameter shifts indeed leads to more accurate derivative estimates.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Interpolation-based coordinate descent method for parameterized quantum circuits

Parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) are ubiquitous in the design of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms. In this work, we propose an interpolation-based coordinate descent (ICD) method to address the parameter optimization problem in PQCs. The ICD method provides a unified framework for existing structure optimization techniques such as Rotosolve, sequential minimal optimization, ExcitationSolve, and others. ICD employs interpolation to approximate the PQC cost function, effectively recovering its underlying trigonometric structure, and then performs an argmin update on a single parameter in each iteration. In contrast to previous studies on structure optimization, we determine the optimal interpolation nodes to mitigate statistical errors arising from quantum measurements. Moreover, in the common case of $r$ equidistant frequencies, we show that the optimal interpolation nodes are equidistant nodes with spacing $2π/(2r+1)$ (under constant variance assumption), and that our ICD method simultaneously minimizes the mean squared error, the condition number of the interpolation matrix, and the average variance of the approximated cost function. We perform numerical simulations and test on the MaxCut problem, the transverse field Ising model, and the XXZ model. Numerical results imply that our ICD method is more efficient than the commonly used gradient descent and random coordinate descent method.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Hyperbolic Knowledge Transfer in Cross-Domain Recommendation System

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) seeks to utilize knowledge from different domains to alleviate the problem of data sparsity in the target recommendation domain, and it has been gaining more attention in recent years. Although there have been notable advancements in this area, most current methods represent users and items in Euclidean space, which is not ideal for handling long-tail distributed data in recommendation systems. Additionally, adding data from other domains can worsen the long-tail characteristics of the entire dataset, making it harder to train CDR models effectively. Recent studies have shown that hyperbolic methods are particularly suitable for modeling long-tail distributions, which has led us to explore hyperbolic representations for users and items in CDR scenarios. However, due to the distinct characteristics of the different domains, applying hyperbolic representation learning to CDR tasks is quite challenging. In this paper, we introduce a new framework called Hyperbolic Contrastive Learning (HCTS), designed to capture the unique features of each domain while enabling efficient knowledge transfer between domains. We achieve this by embedding users and items from each domain separately and mapping them onto distinct hyperbolic manifolds with adjustable curvatures for prediction. To improve the representations of users and items in the target domain, we develop a hyperbolic contrastive learning module for knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that hyperbolic manifolds are a promising alternative to Euclidean space for CDR tasks.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Riemannian Interior Point Methods for Constrained Optimization on Manifolds

We extend the classical primal-dual interior point method from the Euclidean setting to the Riemannian one. Our method, named the Riemannian interior point method, is for solving Riemannian constrained optimization problems. We establish its local superlinear and quadratic convergence under the standard assumptions. Moreover, we show its global convergence when it is combined with a classical line search. Our method is a generalization of the classical framework of primal-dual interior point methods for nonlinear nonconvex programming. Numerical experiments show the stability and efficiency of our method.

math.OC↗

arXiv2022

Completely Positive Factorization by a Riemannian Smoothing Method

Copositive optimization is a special case of convex conic programming, and it consists of optimizing a linear function over the cone of all completely positive matrices under linear constraints. Copositive optimization provides powerful relaxations of NP-hard quadratic problems or combinatorial problems, but there are still many open problems regarding copositive or completely positive matrices. In this paper, we focus on one such problem; finding a completely positive (CP) factorization for a given completely positive matrix. We treat it as a nonsmooth Riemannian optimization problem, i.e., a minimization problem of a nonsmooth function over a Riemannian manifold. To solve this problem, we present a general smoothing framework for solving nonsmooth Riemannian optimization problems and show convergence to a stationary point of the original problem. An advantage is that we can implement it quickly with minimal effort by directly using the existing standard smooth Riemannian solvers, such as Manopt. Numerical experiments show the efficiency of our method especially for large-scale CP factorizations.

math.OC↗