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Changhun Oh

Publications and source records attributed to Changhun Oh.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Ultimate Information Rate for Quantum Sensing under Multilevel Relaxation

We determine the ultimate information rate of a relaxing multilevel quantum sensor under unrestricted adaptive control and construct an explicit strategy that attains it. We consider sensing a weak field that couples the ground state to several excited states that decay back to the ground state, a setting that reduces to amplitude-damping sensing for a single excited state. We show that the ultimate information rate is exactly the mean population lifetime of the bright state coupled to the ground state by the signal. Although the sensing dynamics generally involve several decay modes, an explicit rank-one protocol that monitors the ground--bright coherence using fresh meters and classical feedback attains this rate while keeping its finite-time information deficit bounded by a constant. For independently relaxing identical sensors, independent local monitoring attains the sum of their individual optimal rates, so intersensor entanglement and joint quantum error correction cannot increase the asymptotic rate. Consequently, the free population-decay curve provides an operational measure of the optimal sensing performance under arbitrary adaptive control.

quant-ph

Understanding and Exploiting Diagonal Attention Sparsity in Autoregressive Image Generation

Autoregressive image generation has emerged as a paradigm for multimodal AI systems due to its compatibility with transformer-based LLM serving infrastructures. However, generating thousands of visual tokens per request makes decoding increasingly bottlenecked by KV cache accesses during attention computation. Sparse attention is particularly attractive for this workload because many visual generation applications tolerate moderate quality degradation in exchange for improved performance and efficiency. While sparse attention has been extensively explored for text-based LLM inference, it remains unclear whether its sparsity assumptions generalize effectively to autoregressive image generation. We present the first systematic characterization of attention sparsity in autoregressive image generation across diverse workloads and representative open-source models. Our analysis reveals several distinguishing properties, including a pronounced prefill-decode asymmetry, strong attention concentration on prompt and local tokens, and a unique diagonal attention sparsity pattern arising from the spatial locality of visual tokens. Motivated by these observations, we propose a diagonal-aware sparse attention mechanism that selectively skips KV entries along the diagonal attention direction within a recent window. Implemented on top of a GPU-based serving system using FlexGen, FlashAttention-2, and custom kernels, our approach achieves up to 3.1x throughput and 1.19x latency improvements with less than 2% quality degradation compared to dense inference.

cs.CV

Logarithmic-depth quantum simulation of boson sampling

We show that boson sampling with an arbitrary $m$-mode interferometer and $n\le m$ single-photon inputs can be simulated to inverse-polynomial total-variation error by a logarithmic-depth qubit circuit with polynomially many qubits. The circuit uses Clifford+$T$ gates, arbitrary qubit connectivity, and a single final measurement, and its family is logspace uniform. The key idea is to enlarge the optical system, decompose the resulting transformation into six quadratic shears, and distribute each mode over many submodes. This redistribution permits a fixed local occupation cutoff, after which local basis changes and parallel phase gates give the qubit circuit. Consequently, our result places boson sampling within shallow quantum computation.

quant-ph

Higher moment theory and learnability of bosonic states

We present a sample- and time-efficient algorithm to learn any bosonic Fock state acted upon by an arbitrary Gaussian unitary. As a special case, this algorithm efficiently learns states produced in Fock state BosonSampling, thus resolving an open question put forth by Aaronson and Grewal (Aaronson, Grewal 2023). We further study a hierarchy of classes of states beyond Gaussian states that are specified by a finite number of their higher moments. Using the higher moments, we find a full spectrum of invariants under Gaussian unitaries, thereby providing necessary conditions for two states to be related by an arbitrary (including active, e.g. beyond linear optics) Gaussian unitary.

quant-ph

Threshold and Parity BosonSampling in the Linear-Mode Regime

BosonSampling is among the most prominent candidates for demonstrating quantum advantage. However, while the hardness of BosonSampling relies on photon-number-resolving detection, many experimentally relevant settings and applications instead use binary readout based on threshold or parity measurements, whose computational complexity has not yet been rigorously characterized. In this work, we investigate the computational complexity of BosonSampling with threshold and parity measurements in the linear-mode regime, where the number of modes scales linearly with the number of photons and is most relevant to current experiments. In particular, we establish average-case #P-hardness of estimating typical output probabilities in threshold and parity BosonSampling, a crucial ingredient in proving the classical hardness of the corresponding sampling problems. The resulting imprecision bounds match those obtained in prior hardness results for standard photon-number-resolving BosonSampling in the linear-mode regime. The key technical ingredient is a Fourier-coefficient extraction method, induced by coherent beam-splitter rotations, that extracts hidden hard components within coarse-grained output probabilities. These results indicate that the hard output-probability structure of photon-number-resolving BosonSampling can persist under natural binary coarse-grainings, even in collision-dominant regimes.

quant-ph

Optimal copy complexity of quantum state cloning

Quantum state cloning is the task of approximately producing additional copies of an unknown quantum state from a finite number of input copies. The optimal cloning fidelity is known exactly for pure states, but no comparable characterization is known for general mixed states. We determine the optimal asymptotic copy complexity for $d$-dimensional states of rank at most $r$: producing $M$ additional copies with worst-case fidelity at least $1-\varepsilon$ requires and is achievable with $N=Θ(Mrd/\varepsilon)$ input copies. Remarkably, the lower bound already holds for a family of states with a fixed flat spectrum, while the matching upper bound is achieved by random purification followed by optimal pure-state cloning. For $M=1$, we further show that high-fidelity tomography can be coherently converted into cloning with comparable error, revealing an operational origin of the matching cloning and tomography complexities.

quant-ph

Classical Petermann Factor as a Measure of Quantum Squeezing in Photonic Time Crystals

Photonic time crystals realize a continuum of momentum-resolved SU(1,1) parametric amplifiers. We show that a classical quantity, the Petermann factor of the effective Floquet Bogoliubov de Gennes (BdG) dynamical matrix, sets the scale of their quantum noise. In stable bands it fixes the Bogoliubov mixing and hence the mean bare-photon occupation of the Floquet vacuum, while in momentum gaps it sets the photon-number prefactor and enhances the squeezing dynamics, with the Floquet growth rate setting the time scale. This converts classical measurements of mode nonorthogonality into quantitative predictions for squeezing and photon generation, and offers a compact design parameter for engineering quantum resources in two-mode BdG platforms.

physics.optics

Hardness and Complexity Transition of Noisy Random Circuit Sampling

Random circuit sampling (RCS) is a leading candidate for demonstrating quantum advantage, supported by strong complexity-theoretic evidence of hardness in the ideal setting and by rapid experimental progress to date. In practice, however, noise is unavoidable, and a central problem is to identify the noise-strength boundary between classically simulable and classically hard regimes. In this work, we establish an architecture-general hardness bound for this boundary for the standard local depolarizing noise of strength $γ$. Assuming the standard average-case #P-hardness conjecture for ideal RCS, we show that, for any circuit architecture satisfying this conjecture, noisy RCS on the same architecture remains hard to simulate classically within any inverse-polynomial total variation distance whenever $γ=O(\log n/(nd))$ for $n$-qubit circuits of depth $d$, unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses. Crucially, noisy-RCS hardness follows without any additional conjectural or architecture-specific assumption beyond those already entering the ideal-RCS hardness framework. Our proof combines a low-degree polynomial extrapolation with a monotonicity reduction showing that efficient classical simulation at one depolarizing noise strength implies efficient simulation at every larger strength. Together, these ingredients transfer the standard ideal-RCS hardness conjecture to sampling hardness at a prespecified noise strength. Finally, combining the convergence-to-uniformity result of Dalzell et al. [Commun. Math. Phys. 405, 78 (2024)] with our monotonicity reduction yields efficient classical simulation for $γ=ω(\log n/(nd))$ on layered, regularly connected architectures. Thus, wherever the two architectural settings overlap, this identifies $γ=Θ(\log n/(nd))$ as the asymptotic complexity-transition scale.

quant-ph

Matrix product state approach to lossy boson sampling and noisy IQP sampling

Sampling problems have emerged as a central avenue for demonstrating quantum advantage on noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. However, physical noise can fundamentally alter their computational complexity, often making them classically tractable. Motivated by the recent success of matrix product state (MPS)-based classical simulation of Gaussian boson sampling (Oh et al., 2024), we extend this framework to investigate the classical simulability of other noisy quantum sampling models. We develop MPS-based classical algorithms for lossy boson sampling and noisy instantaneous quantum polynomial-time (IQP) sampling, both of which retain the tunable accuracy characteristic of the MPS approach through the bond dimension. Our approach constructs pure-state decompositions of noisy or lossy input states whose components remain weakly entangled after circuit evolution, thereby providing a means to systematically explore the boundary between quantum-hard and classically-simulable regimes. For boson sampling, we analyze single-photon, Fock, and cat-state inputs, showing that classical simulability emerges at transmission rates scaling as $O(1/\sqrt{N})$, reaching the known boundary of quantum advantage with a tunable and scalable method. Beyond reproducing previous thresholds, our algorithm offers significantly improved control over the accuracy-efficiency trade-off. It further extends the applicability of MPS-based simulation to broader classes of noisy quantum sampling models, including IQP circuits.

quant-ph

Coherent-disorder-driven complexity transitions in a quantum-advantage architecture

While decoherence is known to erode classical hardness in quantum random sampling, the impact of coherent spatial disorder remains an open question. We study a square-lattice instantaneous quantum polynomial-time (IQP) architecture subject to two-qubit gate-angle disorder and single-qubit dephasing using exact tensor-network simulations up to 576 qubits. For finite systems without dephasing, increasing disorder drives two consecutive crossovers toward classical simulability: the output distribution first loses anticoncentration, and then the tensor-network simulation cost drops from exponential to polynomial as entanglement is suppressed. The finite-size scaling collapses are consistent with continuous transitions in the large-system limit. Dephasing further reduces the complexity. We characterize the computationally hard regime through scaling laws that provide quantitative error-budget bounds for realistic near-term devices.

quant-ph

Bound Entanglement Is Insufficient for an Exponential Quantum Learning Advantage

While entanglement is known to enable exponential improvements in the sample complexity of quantum learning, it remains unclear which properties of entangled resources are responsible for such improvements. We address this question through the reduction criterion, a condition obeyed by all bound-entangled states. In $n$-qubit Pauli-channel learning, we show that restricting either the input states or the measurement effects to satisfy this criterion rules out an exponential advantage for incoherent adaptive protocols. An exponential lower bound persists for the one-sided coherent adaptive protocols considered here, even when the unrestricted side retains quantum correlations across channel uses. Using conditional min-entropy, we further quantify how the sample-complexity lower bounds weaken as larger violations of the reduction criterion are allowed. Finally, we show that the same obstruction appears in conjugate-state learning: restricted joint measurements cannot reproduce the logarithmic-sample advantage of unrestricted joint measurements on $ρ\otimesρ^*$. These results identify violation of the reduction criterion as a necessary condition for an exponential advantage in the learning tasks considered here.

quant-ph

Disentangling Haldane Phase by Generalized Clifford Circuits

Disentangling transformations play a central role in the classical simulation of quantum many-body systems, yet their analytic structure and underlying mechanism remain largely unexplored. Here, we study the structure of the disentangler in the Haldane phase of spin-1 systems using generalized Clifford circuits. To this end, we extend the Clifford-circuit-augmented matrix product states (CAMPS)-based density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) method to spin-1 systems. Within this framework, we find that the local disentanglers optimized for the Haldane phase implement the generalized Kramers--Wannier (KW) transformation, and we analytically verify its optimality for the Affleck--Kennedy--Lieb--Tasaki (AKLT) state. Beyond reducing entanglement, the KW transformation maps the Haldane phase to a phase with spontaneously broken $\mathbb{Z}_{2}$ symmetry. This mapping is distinct from the Kennedy--Tasaki transformation and provides a new unitary route from symmetry-protected topological order to symmetry breaking.

quant-ph

When to Skip Syndrome Extraction in Surface-GKP Codes

Fault-tolerant quantum error correction requires repeated syndrome extraction to address errors induced by the syndrome-extraction circuit itself. However, repeated syndrome extraction incurs significant overhead in terms of gate count and ancilla consumption (e.g., Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) states). Moreover, noisy syndrome extraction can itself inject additional errors into the data qubits. To address these issues, we propose a concrete adaptive skipping scheme for the surface-GKP code, a representative GKP-concatenated architecture, that uses analog information naturally generated during inner GKP correction. At each round, the scheme selects one of four actions: measuring both Z-type and X-type surface-code stabilizers, measuring only one type, or skipping both types and reusing previous syndromes. The decision is based on a reliability comparison between reusing the previous syndrome value and performing a new noisy syndrome extraction. Using circuit-level simulations, we show that the adaptive skipping scheme can reduce the number of surface-code stabilizer measurements while maintaining logical error rates comparable to or lower than those of the full-measurement baseline. The improvement is most pronounced when gate and measurement noise are larger than idle noise, so that avoiding unnecessary syndrome extraction reduces the noise injected into the code. These results indicate that analog information from inner GKP correction can be used not only to improve decoding but also to reduce the measurement overhead of outer-code syndrome extraction.

quant-ph

Representing Time Series as Structured Programs for LLM Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning and instruction-following capabilities, making them potentially powerful tools for time-series analysis. However, time series lie outside their native textual modality, raising a fundamental question: how should time series be represented so that LLMs can reason about them effectively? Existing work typically serializes raw numerical sequences or fine-tunes pre-trained LLMs on time-series data. These approaches place the burden of extracting temporal structure directly on the LLM, creating a modality mismatch that often degrades performance on long sequences and introduces substantial computational overhead. In this work, we introduce Time-Series-to-Structured-Program representation (T2SP), a deterministic, training-free method that represents a time series as a structured symbolic program. T2SP decomposes time series into trends, periods, and salient events, expressing them in a program-friendly format aligned with the textual and code-like modalities on which LLMs are natively trained. By shifting temporal-structure extraction from the model to the representation itself, T2SP enables off-the-shelf LLMs to leverage their existing reasoning capabilities for time-series understanding. We evaluate T2SP on three reasoning tasks -- editing, captioning, and question answering -- where it consistently improves performance, reduces reasoning time, and lowers failure rates compared with raw-string representations. Our results demonstrate that T2SP provides an effective interface between time series and LLMs.

cs.LG

Virtual purification complements quantum error correction in quantum metrology

Quantum resources enable one to achieve quantum-enhanced estimation sensitivity beyond its classical counterpart. Many studies mainly focus on reducing statistical error, under the assumption that one can always set an unbiased estimator. However, setting an unbiased estimator is not always feasible, especially when one cannot fully characterize noise. Such incomplete noise characterization induces a bias and eventually makes it impossible to attain the enhanced-estimation. In this work, we explore two systematic approaches; quantum error correction (QEC) and the virtual purification (VP) to reduce the bias, and compare their performance. First, we show that when the noise is indistinguishable from the signal, QEC cannot reduce the bias since it is impossible to construct a QEC code that corrects the noise while preserving the signal. We then show that VP can mitigate indistinguishable error that eventually enable a more accurate estimation compared to QEC. Our findings reveal that VP offers a robust alternative to QEC in scenarios where indistinguishable errors pose significant challenges. We then demonstrate that VP with a stabilizer state probe can efficiently suppress the bias under local depolarizing noise, thereby yielding a significant improvement in estimation performance compared to the QEC-based approach.

quant-ph

Classical simulation of free-fermionic dynamics and quantum chemistry with magic input

Establishing the precise computational boundary between classically tractable fermionic systems and those capable of genuine quantum advantage is a central challenge in quantum simulation. While injecting non-Gaussian ``magic" inputs into free-fermion circuits is widely expected to generate intractable complexity, we identify a physically motivated intermediate regime. We prove that for block-product paired non-Gaussian fermionic states, essential quantum simulation primitives -- transition amplitudes, overlaps, and arbitrary-weight number correlators -- can be efficiently approximated to additive error under free-fermionic dynamics. This tractability stems from an algebraic reduction that compresses exponentially large multiparticle interference into a single coefficient of a multivariate Pfaffian polynomial. Because these classical estimators match the intrinsic $O(1/\sqrt{K})$ statistical uncertainty of quantum hardware utilizing $K$ measurement shots, they constitute a practical benchmark. Building on this foundation, we construct an additive-error estimator for high-weight Wilson observables in the noninteracting quench of recent trapped-ion experiments, providing a rigorous classical benchmark. Extending this to quantum chemistry, we demonstrate that core overlap-based subroutines for antisymmetrized products of strongly orthogonal geminals admit efficient additive-error Pfaffian-kernel estimators. Ultimately, these results sharpen the boundary of quantum advantage, establishing that the paired-electron scaffold is dequantized and clarifying where quantum resources are indispensable.

quant-ph

Heisenberg-limited Hamiltonian learning without short-time control

Characterizing quantum systems by learning their underlying Hamiltonians is a central task in quantum information science. While recent algorithmic advances have achieved near-optimal efficiency in this task, they critically rely on accessing arbitrarily short-time dynamics. This reliance poses severe experimental challenges due to finite control bandwidth and transient pulse errors. In this work, we demonstrate that Heisenberg-limited Hamiltonian learning can be achieved without short-time control. We introduce a framework in which every query to the unknown dynamics has duration at least a prescribed minimum time $T$, and show that this restriction does not preclude Heisenberg-limited scaling. The key ingredient is a method for emulating the continuous quantum control required by iterative learning algorithms using only such lower-bounded evolution times. This reduces the learning task to sparse pure-state tomography. Notably, for logarithmically sparse Hamiltonians, our algorithm achieves the information-theoretically optimal $1/\varepsilon$ scaling in total evolution time for any arbitrary constant minimum evolution time $T$. For many-body (polynomially sparse) systems, we uncover a rigorous quantitative tradeoff, showing that the minimum required evolution time can be significantly relaxed from the standard limit at a polynomial cost in total evolution time. Our results affirmatively resolve a prominent open problem in the field and reveal that high-bandwidth, ultra-short pulses are not fundamentally necessary for optimal quantum learning.

quant-ph

Complexity phase transition for continuous-variable cluster state

Continuous-variable (CV) cluster states offer a promising platform for large-scale measurement-based quantum computations (MBQC). However, finite squeezing inevitably introduces Gaussian noise during MBQC. While fault-tolerant MBQC schemes exist in principle, they require the scalable incorporation of non-Gaussian resources, such as GKP states, which remain experimentally challenging. Consequently, a central question at this stage is how finite squeezing fundamentally constrains the intrinsic computational power of CV cluster states themselves. In this work, we address this question by analyzing the classical complexity of measurement-based linear optics (MBLO) implemented with such states, motivated by its near-term feasibility and recent experimental progress. We develop an explicit MBLO framework and examine how the squeezing level governs the complexity of the classical simulation of the resulting output states. Specifically, we identify squeezing-level thresholds that delineate classically tractable and intractable regimes, thereby revealing a squeezing-driven complexity phase transition. These findings advance our understanding of the squeezing resources necessary for meaningful quantum computation in current experimental regimes. Furthermore, they underscore the critical need to either scale the squeezing level or integrate error-correction schemes to achieve reliable, large-scale quantum computation with CV cluster states.

quant-ph