Zeph Landau

STOC Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Learning Quantum States Prepared by Shallow Circuits in Polynomial Time

• Zeph Landau
• Yunchao Liu 0002

STOC Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Learning the Closest Product State

• Ainesh Bakshi
• John Bostanci
• William Kretschmer
• Zeph Landau
• Jerry Li 0001
• Allen Liu
• Ryan O'Donnell
• Ewin Tang

STOC Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Learning Shallow Quantum Circuits

• Hsin-Yuan Huang
• Yunchao Liu 0002
• Michael Broughton
• Isaac Kim 0001
• Anurag Anshu
• Zeph Landau
• Jarrod R. McClean

STOC Conference 2023 Conference Paper

A Polynomial-Time Classical Algorithm for Noisy Random Circuit Sampling

• Dorit Aharonov
• Xun Gao
• Zeph Landau
• Yunchao Liu 0002
• Umesh V. Vazirani

We give a polynomial time classical algorithm for sampling from the output distribution of a noisy random quantum circuit in the regime of anti-concentration to within inverse polynomial total variation distance. The algorithm is based on a quantum analog of noise induced low degree approximations of Boolean functions, which takes the form of the truncation of a Feynman path integral in the Pauli basis.

STOC Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Distributed Quantum inner product estimation

• Anurag Anshu
• Zeph Landau
• Yunchao Liu 0002

As small quantum computers are becoming available on different physical platforms, a benchmarking task known as cross-platform verification has been proposed that aims to estimate the fidelity of states prepared on two quantum computers. This task is fundamentally distributed, as no quantum communication can be performed between the two physical platforms due to hardware constraints, which prohibits a joint SWAP test. In this paper we settle the sample complexity of this task across all measurement and communication settings. The essence of the task, which we call distributed quantum inner product estimation, involves two players Alice and Bob who have k copies of unknown states ρ,σ (acting on ℂ d ) respectively. Their goal is to estimate Tr (ρσ) up to additive error ε∈(0,1), using local quantum operations and classical communication. In the weakest setting where only non-adaptive single-copy measurements and simultaneous message passing are allowed, we show that k = O (max{1/ε 2 ,√ d /ε}) copies suffice. This achieves a savings compared to full tomography which takes Ω( d 3 ) copies with single-copy measurements. Surprisingly, we also show that the sample complexity must be at least Ω(max{1/ε 2 ,√ d /ε}), even in the strongest setting where adaptive multi-copy measurements and arbitrary rounds of communication are allowed. This shows that the success achieved by shadow tomography, for sample-efficiently learning the properties of a single system, cannot be generalized to the distributed setting. Furthermore, the fact that the sample complexity remains the same with single and multi-copy measurements contrasts with single system quantum property testing, which often demonstrate exponential separations in sample complexity with single and multi-copy measurements.

FOCS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Noise and the Frontier of Quantum Supremacy

• Adam Bouland
• Bill Fefferman
• Zeph Landau
• Yunchao Liu 0002

Noise is the defining feature of the NISQ era, but it remains unclear if noisy quantum devices are capable of quantum speedups. Quantum supremacy experiments have been a major step forward, but gaps remain between the theory behind these experiments and their actual implementations. In this work we initiate the study of the complexity of quantum random circuit sampling experiments with realistic amounts of noise. Actual quantum supremacy experiments have high levels of uncorrected noise and exponentially decaying fidelities. It is natural to ask if there is any signal of exponential complexity in these highly noisy devices. Surprisingly, we show that it remains hard to compute the output probabilities of noisy random quantum circuits without error correction. More formally, so long as the noise rate of the device is below the error detection threshold, we show it is #P-hard to compute the output probabilities of random circuits with a constant rate of noise per gate. This hardness persists even though these probabilities are exponentially close to uniform. Therefore the small deviations away from uniformity are hard to compute, formalizing an important intuition behind Google's supremacy claim. Interestingly these hardness results also have implications for the complexity of experiments in a low-noise setting. The issue here is that prior hardness results for computing output proba-bilities of random circuits are not robust enough to imprecision to connect with the Stockmeyer argument for hardness of sampling from circuits with constant fidelity. We exponentially improve the robustness of prior results to imprecision, both in the cases of Random Circuit Sampling and BosonSampling. In the latter case we bring the proven hardness within a constant factor in the exponent of the robustness required for hardness of sampling for the first time. We then show that our results are in tension with one another - the high-noise result implies the low-noise result is essentially optimal, even with generalizations of our techniques.

FOCS Conference 2014 Conference Paper

Local Tests of Global Entanglement and a Counterexample to the Generalized Area Law

• Dorit Aharonov
• Aram W. Harrow
• Zeph Landau
• Daniel Nagaj
• Mario Szegedy
• Umesh V. Vazirani

We introduce a technique for applying quantum expanders in a distributed fashion, and use it to solve two basic questions: testing whether a bipartite quantum state shared by two parties is the maximally entangled state and disproving a generalized area law. In the process these two questions which appear completely unrelated turn out to be two sides of the same coin. Strikingly in both cases a constant amount of resources are used to verify a global property.

FOCS Conference 2011 Conference Paper

The 1D Area Law and the Complexity of Quantum States: A Combinatorial Approach

• Dorit Aharonov
• Itai Arad
• Zeph Landau
• Umesh V. Vazirani

The classical description of quantum states is in general exponential in the number of qubits. Can we get polynomial descriptions for more restricted sets of states such as ground states of interesting subclasses of local Hamiltonians? This is the basic problem in the study of the complexity of ground states, and requires an understanding of multi-particle entanglement and quantum correlations in such states. Area laws provide a fundamental ingredient in the study of the complexity of ground states, since they offer a way to bound in a quantitative way the entanglement in such states. Although they have long been conjectured for many body systems in arbitrary dimensions, a general rigorous was only recently proved in Hastings' seminal paper [8] for ID systems. In this paper, we give a combinatorial proof of the ID area law for the special case of frustration free systems, improving by an exponential factor the scaling in terms of the inverse spectral gap and the dimensionality of the particles. The scaling in terms of the dimension of the particles is a potentially important issue in the context of resolving the 2D case and higher dimensions, which is one of the most important open questions in Hamiltonian complexity. Our proof is based on a reformulation of the detectability lemma, introduced by us in the context of quantum gap amplification [1]. We give an alternative proof of the detectability lemma, which is not only simpler and more intuitive than the original proof, but also removes a key restriction in the original statement, making it more suitable for this new context. We also give a one page proof of Hastings' proof that the correlations in the ground states of gapped Hamiltonians decay exponentially with the distance, demonstrating the simplicity of the combinatorial approach for those problems.

STOC Conference 2009 Conference Paper

The detectability lemma and quantum gap amplification

• Dorit Aharonov
• Itai Arad
• Zeph Landau
• Umesh V. Vazirani

The quantum analogue of the constraint satisfaction problem is the fundamental physics question of finding the minimal energy state of a local Hamiltonian --- each term of the Hamiltonian specifies a local constraint whose violation contributes to the energy of the given quantum state. However, in general it is not meaningful to ask for the probability that a given quantum state violates at least one constraint; the difficulty being that the terms of the Hamiltonian do not commute. We show how to make sense of this notion under mild restrictions on the form of the Hamiltonian. We then provide two main results. We first prove the quantum detectability lemma , which states that the probability of detecting a violation of a constraint in a local Hamiltonian system is bounded from below by some constant times the minimal energy of the system. The proof reveals some intrinsic structure of the Hilbert space of local Hamiltonians, which is captured in the "exponential decay" lemma, and formalized using a novel decomposition of the Hilbert space called the XY decomposition. As an application of the detectability lemma, we prove our second main result: a quantum analogue of the classical gap amplification lemma using random walks over expander graphs, which was the seed for Dinur's celebrated new proof of the PCP theorem [6]. We hope that these results will pave the way to better understandings of the computational properties of local Hamiltonians systems, and to the evolving field of quantum Hamiltonian complexity.

STOC Conference 2006 Conference Paper

A polynomial quantum algorithm for approximating the Jones polynomial

• Dorit Aharonov
• Vaughan Jones
• Zeph Landau

The Jones polynomial, discovered in 1984 [18], is an important knot invariant in topology. Among its many connections to various mathematical and physical areas, it is known (due to Witten [32]) to be intimately connected to Topological Quantum Field Theory (TQFT). The works of Freedman, Kitaev, Larsen and Wang [13, 14] provide an efficient simulation of TQFT by a quantum computer, and vice versa. These results implicitly imply the existence of an efficient quantum algorithm that provides a certain additive approximation of the Jones polynomial at the fifth root of unity, e 2 π i/5, and moreover, that this problem is BQP-complete. Unfortunately, this important algorithm was never explicitly formulated. Moreover, the results in [13, 14] are heavily based on TQFT, which makes the algorithm essentially inaccessible to computer scientists.We provide an explicit and simple polynomial quantum algorithm to approximate the Jones polynomial of an n strands braid with m crossings at any primitive root of unity e 2π i/k , where the running time of the algorithm is polynomial in m,n and k. Our algorithm is based, rather than on TQFT, on well known mathematical results (specifically, the path model representation of the braid group and the uniqueness of the Markov trace for the Temperly Lieb algebra). By the results of [14], our algorithm solves a BQP complete problem.The algorithm we provide exhibits a structure which we hope is generalizable to other quantum algorithmic problems. Candidates of particular interest are the approximations of other downwards self-reducible P-hard problems, most notably, the Potts model.

FOCS Conference 2004 Conference Paper

Adiabatic Quantum Computation is Equivalent to Standard Quantum Computation

• Dorit Aharonov
• Wim van Dam
• Julia Kempe
• Zeph Landau
• Seth Lloyd
• Oded Regev 0001

The model of adiabatic quantum computation has recently attracted attention in the physics and computer science communities, but its exact computational power has been unknown. We settle this question and describe an efficient adiabatic simulation of any given quantum algorithm. This implies that the adiabatic computation model and the standard quantum circuit model are polynomially equivalent. We also describe an extension of this result with implications to physical implementations of adiabatic computation. We believe that our result highlights the potential importance of the adiabatic computation model in the design of quantum algorithms and in their experimental realization.