In plain words: Rather than learning an unknown quantum state from a fixed batch of examples, this updates its guess after each new measurement. Its predicted chance of a measurement result is off by at least ε only about n/ε² times, with n the number of quantum bits.
Abstract · Online Learning of Quantum States
Suppose we have many copies of an unknown $n$-qubit state $ρ$. We measure some copies of $ρ$ using a known two-outcome measurement $E_{1}$, then other copies using a measurement $E_{2}$, and so on. At each stage $t$, we generate a current hypothesis $σ_{t}$ about the state $ρ$, using the outcomes of the previous measurements. We show that it is possible to do this in a way that guarantees that $|\operatorname{Tr}(E_{i} σ_{t}) - \operatorname{Tr}(E_{i}ρ) |$, the error in our prediction for the next measurement, is at least $\varepsilon$ at most $\operatorname{O}\!\left(n / \varepsilon^2 \right) $ times. Even in the "non-realizable" setting---where there could be arbitrary noise in the measurement outcomes---we show how to output hypothesis states that do significantly worse than the best possible states at most $\operatorname{O}\!\left(\sqrt {Tn}\right) $ times on the first $T$ measurements. These results generalize a 2007 theorem by Aaronson on the PAC-learnability of quantum states, to the online and regret-minimization settings. We give three different ways to prove our results---using convex optimization, quantum postselection, and sequential fat-shattering dimension---which have different advantages in terms of parameters and portability.
Scott Aaronson, Xinyi Chen, Elad Hazan, Satyen Kale, Ashwin Nayak
arXiv:1802.09025 · quant-ph, cs.LG · submitted Feb 25, 2018 · updated Dec 6, 2019
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