Thomas Vidick

FOCS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Expansion of High-Dimensional Cubical Complexes: with Application to Quantum Locally Testable Codes

• Irit Dinur
• Ting-Chun Lin
• Thomas Vidick

We introduce a high-dimensional cubical complex, for any dimension $t \in \mathbb{N}$, and apply it to the design of quantum locally testable codes. Our complex is a natural generalization of the constructions by Panteleev and Kalachev and by Dinur et. al of a square complex (case $t=2$ ), which have been applied to the design of classical locally testable codes (LTC) and quantum low-density parity check codes (qLDPC) respectively. We turn the geometric (cubical) complex into a chain complex by relying on constant-sized local codes $h_{1}, \ldots, h_{t}$ as gadgets. A recent result of Panteleev and Kalachev on existence of tuples of codes that are product expanding enables us to prove lower bounds on the cycle and co-cycle expansion of our chain complex. For $t=4$ our construction gives a new family of “almost-good” quantum LTCs - with constant relative rate, inverse-polylogarithmic relative distance and soundness, and constant-size parity checks. Both the distance of the quantum code and its local testability are proven directly from the cycle and co-cycle expansion of our chain complex.

STOC Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Good Quantum LDPC Codes with Linear Time Decoders

• Irit Dinur
• Min-Hsiu Hsieh
• Ting-Chun Lin
• Thomas Vidick

FOCS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Quantum soundness of testing tensor codes

• Zhengfeng Ji
• Anand Natarajan 0001
• Thomas Vidick
• John Wright 0004
• Henry Yuen

A locally testable code is an error-correcting code that admits very efficient probabilistic tests of membership. Tensor codes provide a simple family of combinatorial constructions of locally testable codes that generalize the family of Reed-Muller codes. The natural test for tensor codes, the axis-parallel line vs. point test, plays an essential role in constructions of probabilistically checkable proofs. We analyze the axis-parallel line vs. point test as a two-prover game and show that the test is sound against quantum provers sharing entanglement. Our result implies the quantum-soundness of the low individual degree test, which is an essential component of the MIP* = RE theorem. Our proof also generalizes to the infinite-dimensional commuting-operator model of quantum provers.

FOCS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Computationally-Secure and Composable Remote State Preparation

• Alexandru Gheorghiu
• Thomas Vidick

We introduce a protocol between a classical polynomial-time verifier and a quantum polynomial-time prover that allows the verifier to securely delegate to the prover the preparation of certain single-qubit quantum states The prover is unaware of which state he received and moreover, the verifier can check with high confidence whether the preparation was successful. The delegated preparation of single-qubit states is an elementary building block in many quantum cryptographic protocols. We expect our implementation of "random remote state preparation with verification", a functionality first defined in (Dunjko and Kashefi 2014), to be useful for removing the need for quantum communication in such protocols while keeping functionality. The main application that we detail is to a protocol for blind and verifiable delegated quantum computation (DQC) that builds on the work of (Fitzsimons and Kashefi 2018), who provided such a protocol with quantum communication. Recently, both blind an verifiable DQC were shown to be possible, under computational assumptions, with a classical polynomial-time client (Mahadev 2017, Mahadev 2018). Compared to the work of Mahadev, our protocol is more modular, applies to the measurement-based model of computation (instead of the Hamiltonian model) and is composable. Our proof of security builds on ideas introduced in (Brakerski et al. 2018).

STOC Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Quantum proof systems for iterated exponential time, and beyond

• Joseph F. Fitzsimons
• Zhengfeng Ji
• Thomas Vidick
• Henry Yuen

FOCS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

A Cryptographic Test of Quantumness and Certifiable Randomness from a Single Quantum Device

• Zvika Brakerski
• Paul F. Christiano
• Urmila Mahadev
• Umesh V. Vazirani
• Thomas Vidick

We give a protocol for producing certifiable randomness from a single untrusted quantum device that is polynomial-time bounded. The randomness is certified to be statistically close to uniform from the point of view of any computationally unbounded quantum adversary, that may share entanglement with the quantum device. The protocol relies on the existence of post-quantum secure trapdoor claw-free functions, and introduces a new primitive for constraining the power of an untrusted quantum device. We then show how to construct this primitive based on the hardness of the learning with errors (LWE) problem. The randomness protocol can also be used as the basis for an efficiently verifiable "quantum supremacy" proposal, thus answering an outstanding challenge in the field.

FOCS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Low-Degree Testing for Quantum States, and a Quantum Entangled Games PCP for QMA

• Anand Natarajan 0001
• Thomas Vidick

We show that given an explicit description of a multiplayer game, with a classical verifier and a constant number of players, it is QMA-hard, under randomized reductions, to distinguish between the cases when the players have a strategy using entanglement that succeeds with probability 1 in the game, or when no such strategy succeeds with probability larger than 1/2. This proves the “games quantum PCP conjecture” of Fitzsimons and the second author (ITCS'15), albeit under randomized reductions. The core component in our reduction is a construction of a family of two-player games for testing n-qubit maximally entangled states. For any integer n ≥ 2, we give such a game in which questions from the verifier are O(log n) bits long, and answers are poly(loglogn) bits long. We show that for any constant ε ≥ 0, any strategy that succeeds with probability at least 1 - ε in the test must use a state that is within distance δ(ε) = O(ε c ) from a state that is locally equivalent to a maximally entangled state on n qubits, for some universal constant c > 0. The construction is based on the classical plane-vs-point test for multivariate low-degree polynomials of Raz and Safra (STOC'97). We extend the classical test to the quantum regime by executing independent copies of the test in the generalized Pauli X and Z bases over Fq, where q is a sufficiently large prime power, and combine the two through a test for the Pauli twisted commutation relations. Our main complexity-theoretic result is obtained by combining this family of games with techniques from the classical PCP literature. More specifically, we use constructions of PCPs of proximity introduced by Ben-Sasson et al. (CCC'05), and crucially rely on a linear property of such PCPs. Another consequence of our results is a deterministic reduction from the games quantum PCP conjecture to a suitable formulation of the constraint satisfaction quantum PCP conjecture.

STOC Conference 2017 Conference Paper

A quantum linearity test for robustly verifying entanglement

• Anand Natarajan 0001
• Thomas Vidick

STOC Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Hardness amplification for entangled games via anchoring

• Mohammad Bavarian
• Thomas Vidick
• Henry Yuen

We study the parallel repetition of one-round games involving players that can use quantum entanglement. A major open question in this area is whether parallel repetition reduces the entangled value of a game at an exponential rate - in other words, does an analogue of Raz's parallel repetition theorem hold for games with players sharing quantum entanglement? Previous results only apply to special classes of games. We introduce a class of games we call anchored . We then introduce a simple transformation on games called anchoring , inspired in part by the Feige-Kilian transformation, that turns any (multiplayer) game into an anchored game. Unlike the Feige-Kilian transformation, our anchoring transformation is completeness preserving. We prove an exponential-decay parallel repetition theorem for anchored games that involve any number of entangled players. We also prove a threshold version of our parallel repetition theorem for anchored games. Together, our parallel repetition theorems and anchoring transformation provide the first hardness amplification techniques for general entangled games. We give an application to the games version of the Quantum PCP Conjecture.

STOC Conference 2013 Conference Paper

Efficient rounding for the noncommutative grothendieck inequality

• Assaf Naor
• Oded Regev 0001
• Thomas Vidick

The classical Grothendieck inequality has applications to the design of approximation algorithms for NP-hard optimization problems. We show that an algorithmic interpretation may also be given for a noncommutative generalization of the Grothendieck inequality due to Pisier and Haagerup. Our main result, an efficient rounding procedure for this inequality, leads to a constant-factor polynomial time approximation algorithm for an optimization problem which generalizes the Cut Norm problem of Frieze and Kannan, and is shown here to have additional applications to robust principle component analysis and the orthogonal Procrustes problem.

FOCS Conference 2012 Conference Paper

A Multi-prover Interactive Proof for NEXP Sound against Entangled Provers

• Tsuyoshi Ito
• Thomas Vidick

We prove a strong limitation on the ability of entangled provers to collude in a multiplayer game. Our main result is the first nontrivial lower bound on the class MIP* of languages having multi-prover interactive proofs with entangled provers, namely MIP* contains NEXP, the class of languages decidable in non-deterministic exponential time. While Babai, Fort now, and Lund (Computational Complexity 1991) proved the celebrated equality MIP = NEXP in the absence of entanglement, ever since the introduction of the class MIP* it was open whether shared entanglement between the provers could weaken or strengthen the computational power of multi-prover interactive proofs. Our result shows that it does not weaken their computational power: MIP* contains MIP. At the heart of our result is a proof that Babai, Fort now, and Lund's multilinearity test is sound even in the presence of entanglement between the provers, and our analysis of this test could be of independent interest. As a byproduct we show that the correlations produced by any entangled strategy which succeeds in the multilinearity test with high probability can always be closely approximated using shared randomness alone.

STOC Conference 2012 Conference Paper

Certifiable quantum dice: or, true random number generation secure against quantum adversaries

• Umesh V. Vazirani
• Thomas Vidick

STOC Conference 2011 Conference Paper

Parallel repetition of entangled games

• Julia Kempe
• Thomas Vidick

STOC Conference 2010 Conference Paper

Near-optimal extractors against quantum storage

• Anindya De
• Thomas Vidick

We show that Trevisan's extractor and its variants [22,19] are secure against bounded quantum storage adversaries. One instantiation gives the first such extractor to achieve an output length Θ(K-b), where K is the source's entropy and b the adversary's storage, together with a poly-logarithmic seed length. Another instantiation achieves a logarithmic key length, with a slightly smaller output length Θ((K-b)/K γ ) for any γ>0. In contrast, the previous best construction [21] could only extract (K/b) 1/15 bits. Some of our constructions have the additional advantage that every bit of the output is a function of only a polylogarithmic number of bits from the source, which is crucial for some cryptographic applications. Our argument is based on bounds for a generalization of quantum random access codes, which we call quantum functional access codes . This is crucial as it lets us avoid the local list-decoding algorithm central to the approach in [21], which was the source of the multiplicative overhead.

FOCS Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Entangled Games are Hard to Approximate

• Julia Kempe
• Hirotada Kobayashi
• Keiji Matsumoto
• Ben Toner
• Thomas Vidick

We establish the first hardness results for the problem of computing the value of one-round games played by a referee and a team of players who can share quantum entanglement. In particular, we show that it is NP-hard to approximate within an inverse polynomial the value of a one-round game with (i) quantum referee and two entangled players or (ii) classical referee and three entangled players. Previously it was not even known if computing the value exactly is NP-hard. We also describe a mathematical conjecture, which, if true, would imply hardness of approximation to within a constant. We start our proof by describing two ways to modify classical multi-player games to make them resistant to entangled players. We then show that a strategy for the modified game that uses entanglement can be "rounded'' to one that does not. The results then follow from classical inapproximability bounds. Our work implies that, unless P = NP, the values of entangled-player games cannot be computed by semidefinite programs that are polynomial in the size of the referee's system, a method that has been successful for more restricted quantum games.