UC Berkeley

Most quantum algorithms offering speedups over classical algorithms are based on the three techniques of phase estimation, amplitude estimation and Hamiltonian simulation. In spite of the linear algebraic nature of the postulates of quantum mechanics, until recent work by Lloyd and coauthors cite{LMR13, LMR13a, LMR13b} no quantum algorithms achieving speedups for linear algebra or machine learning had been proposed.

A quantum machine learning algorithm must address three issues: encoding of classical data into a succinct quantum representation, processing the quantum representation and extraction of classically useful information from the processed quantum state. In this dissertation, we make progress on all three aspects of the quantum machine learning problem and obtain quantum algorithms for low rank approximation and regularized least squares.

The oracle $QRAM$, the standard model studied in quantum query complexity, requires time $O(sqrt{n})$ to encode vectors $v in R^{n}$ into quantum states. We propose simple hardware augmentations to the oracle $QRAM$, that enable vectors $v in R^{n}$ to be encoded in time $O(log n)$, with pre-processing. The augmented $QRAM$ incurs minimal hardware overheads, the pre-processing can be parallelized and is a flexible model that allows storage of multiple vectors and matrices. It provides a framework for designing quantum algorithms for linear algebra and machine learning.

Using the augmented $QRAM$ for vector state preparation, we present two different algorithms for singular value estimation where given singular vector $ket{v}$ for $A in R^{mtimes n}$, the singular value $sigma_{i}$ is estimated within additive error $epsilon norm{A}_{F}$. The first algorithm requires time $wt{1/epsilon^{3}}$ and uses the approach for simulating $e^{-i rho}$ in cite{LMR13}. However, the analysis cite{LMR13} does not establish the coherence of outputs, we provide a qualitatively different analysis that uses the quantum Zeno effect to establish coherence and reveals the probabilistic nature of the simulation technique. The second algorithm has a running time $wt{1/epsilon}$ and uses Jordan's lemma from linear algebra and the augmented $QRAM$ to implement reflections.

We use quantum singular value estimation to obtain algorithms for low rank approximation by column selection, the algorithms are based on importance sampling from the leverage score distribution. We obtain quadratic speedups for a large class of linear algebra algorithms that rely on importance sampling from the leverage score distribution including approximate least squares and $CX$ and $CUR$ decompositions. Classical algorithms for these problems require time $O(mn log n + poly(1/epsilon))$, the quantum algorithms have running time $O(sqrt{m}poly(1/epsilon, k, Delta))$ where $k, Delta$ are the rank and spectral gap. The running time of the quantum $CX$ decomposition algorithm does not depend on $m$, it is polynomial in problem parameters. We also provide quantum algorithms for $ell_{2}$ regularized regression problems, the quantum ridge regression algorithm requires time $wt{1/mu^{2} delta}$ to output a quantum state that is $delta$ close to the solution, where $mu$ is the regularization parameter.