arXiv subjects

Mingsheng Ying

Publications and source records attributed to Mingsheng Ying.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Atomicity in Distributed Quantum Computing

Atomicity is a ubiquitous assumption in distributed computing, under which actions are indivisible and appear sequential. In classical computing, this assumption has several theoretical and practical guarantees. In quantum computing, although atomicity is still commonly assumed, it has not been seriously studied, and a rigorous basis for it is missing. Classical results on atomicity do not directly carry over to distributed quantum computing, due to new challenges caused by quantum entanglement and the measurement problem from the underlying quantum mechanics. In this paper, we initiate the study of atomicity in distributed quantum computing. A formal model of (non-atomic) distributed quantum system is established. Based on the Dijkstra-Lamport condition, the system dynamics and observable dynamics of a distributed quantum system are defined, which correspond to the quantum state of and classically observable events in the system, respectively. Within this framework, we prove that local actions can be regarded as if they were atomic, up to the observable dynamics of the system.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Symbolic Execution for Quantum Error Correction Programs

We define QSE, a symbolic execution framework for quantum programs by integrating symbolic variables into quantum states and the outcomes of quantum measurements. The soundness of QSE is established through a theorem that ensures the correctness of symbolic execution within operational semantics. We further introduce symbolic stabilizer states, which symbolize the phases of stabilizer generators, for the efficient analysis of quantum error correction (QEC) programs. Within the QSE framework, we can use symbolic expressions to characterize the possible discrete Pauli errors in QEC, providing a significant improvement over existing methods that rely on sampling with simulators. We implement QSE with the support of symbolic stabilizer states in a prototype tool named QuantumSE.jl. Our experiments on representative QEC codes, including quantum repetition codes, Kitaev's toric codes, and quantum Tanner codes, demonstrate the efficiency of QuantumSE.jl for debugging QEC programs with over 1000 qubits. In addition, by substituting concrete values in symbolic expressions of measurement results, QuantumSE.jl is also equipped with a sampling feature for stabilizer circuits. Despite a longer initialization time than the state-of-the-art stabilizer simulator, Google's Stim, QuantumSE.jl offers a quicker sampling rate in the experiments.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Parallel Quantum Algorithm for Hamiltonian Simulation

We study how parallelism can speed up quantum simulation. A parallel quantum algorithm is proposed for simulating the dynamics of a large class of Hamiltonians with good sparse structures, called uniform-structured Hamiltonians, including various Hamiltonians of practical interest like local Hamiltonians and Pauli sums. Given the oracle access to the target sparse Hamiltonian, in both query and gate complexity, the running time of our parallel quantum simulation algorithm measured by the quantum circuit depth has a doubly (poly-)logarithmic dependence $\operatorname{polylog}\log(1/ε)$ on the simulation precision $ε$. This presents an exponential improvement over the dependence $\operatorname{polylog}(1/ε)$ of previous optimal sparse Hamiltonian simulation algorithm without parallelism. To obtain this result, we introduce a novel notion of parallel quantum walk, based on Childs' quantum walk. The target evolution unitary is approximated by a truncated Taylor series, which is obtained by combining these quantum walks in a parallel way. A lower bound $Ω(\log \log (1/ε))$ is established, showing that the $ε$-dependence of the gate depth achieved in this work cannot be significantly improved. Our algorithm is applied to simulating three physical models: the Heisenberg model, the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model and a quantum chemistry model in second quantization. By explicitly calculating the gate complexity for implementing the oracles, we show that on all these models, the total gate depth of our algorithm has a $\operatorname{polylog}\log(1/ε)$ dependence in the parallel setting.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Approximation Algorithm for Noisy Quantum Circuit Simulation

Simulating noisy quantum circuits is vital in designing and verifying quantum algorithms in the current NISQ (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) era, where quantum noise is unavoidable. However, it is much more inefficient than the classical counterpart because of the quantum state explosion problem (the dimension of state space is exponential in the number of qubits) and the complex (non-unitary) representation of noises. Consequently, only noisy circuits with up to about 50 qubits can be simulated approximately well. This paper introduces a novel approximation algorithm for simulating noisy quantum circuits when the noisy effectiveness is insignificant to improve the scalability of the circuits that can be simulated. The algorithm is based on a new tensor network diagram for the noisy simulation and uses the singular value decomposition to approximate the tensors of quantum noises in the diagram. The contraction of the tensor network diagram is implemented on Google's TensorNetwork. The effectiveness and utility of the algorithm are demonstrated by experimenting on a series of practical quantum circuits with realistic superconducting noise models. As a result, our algorithm can approximately simulate quantum circuits with up to 225 qubits and 20 noises (within about 1.8 hours). In particular, our method offers a speedup over the commonly-used approximation (sampling) algorithm -- quantum trajectories method. Furthermore, our approach can significantly reduce the number of samples in the quantum trajectories method when the noise rate is small enough.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

SymPhase: Phase Symbolization for Fast Simulation of Stabilizer Circuits

This paper proposes an efficient stabilizer circuit simulation algorithm that only traverses the circuit forward once. We introduce phase symbolization into stabilizer generators, which allows possible Pauli faults in the circuit to be accumulated explicitly as symbolic expressions in the phases of stabilizer generators. This way, the measurement outcomes are also symbolic expressions, and we can sample them by substituting the symbolic variables with concrete values, without traversing the circuit repeatedly. We show how to integrate symbolic phases into the stabilizer tableau and maintain them efficiently using bit-vector encoding. A new data layout of the stabilizer tableau in memory is proposed, which improves the performance of our algorithm (and other stabilizer simulation algorithms based on the stabilizer tableau). We implement our algorithm and data layout in a Julia package named SymPhase.jl, and compare it with Stim, the state-of-the-art simulator, on several benchmarks. We show that SymPhase.jl has superior performance in terms of sampling time, which is crucial for generating a large number of samples for further analysis.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

isQ: Towards a Practical Software Stack for Quantum Programming

We introduce isQ, a new software stack for quantum programming in an imperative programming language, also named isQ. The aim of isQ is to make the programmers write quantum programs as conveniently as possible. In particular: 1) The isQ language and its compiler contain many features, including some not well supported by (most) other quantum programming platforms, e.g. classical control flow such as recursion; decomposition of selfdefined unitary gates; and oracle programming and its circuit realization. 2) To make it flexible, an isQ program can be compiled into several kinds of intermediate representation, including OpenQASM 3.0, QIR and QCIS (specially tailored for the superconducting quantum hardware at USTC). 3) Besides interfacing isQ with true superconducting hardware, a QIR simulator is also developed for demonstration and testing of isQ programs.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Quantum Algorithm for Lexicographically Minimal String Rotation

Lexicographically minimal string rotation (LMSR) is a problem to find the minimal one among all rotations of a string in the lexicographical order, which is widely used in equality checking of graphs, polygons, automata and chemical structures. In this paper, we propose an $O(n^{3/4})$ quantum query algorithm for LMSR. In particular, the algorithm has average-case query complexity $O(\sqrt n \log n)$, which is shown to be asymptotically optimal up to a polylogarithmic factor, compared to its $Ω\left(\sqrt{n/\log n}\right)$ lower bound. Furthermore, we show that our quantum algorithm outperforms any (classical) randomized algorithms in both worst and average cases. As an application, it is used in benzenoid identification and disjoint-cycle automata minimization.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Quantum Recursive Programming with Quantum Case Statements

We introduce a novel scheme of quantum recursive programming, in which large unitary transformations, i.e. quantum gates, can be recursively defined using quantum case statements, which are quantum counterparts of conditionals and case statements extensively used in classical programming. A simple programming language for supporting this kind of quantum recursion is defined, and its semantics is formally described. A series of examples are presented to show that some quantum algorithms can be elegantly written as quantum recursive programs.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2023

Detecting Violations of Differential Privacy for Quantum Algorithms

Quantum algorithms for solving a wide range of practical problems have been proposed in the last ten years, such as data search and analysis, product recommendation, and credit scoring. The concern about privacy and other ethical issues in quantum computing naturally rises up. In this paper, we define a formal framework for detecting violations of differential privacy for quantum algorithms. A detection algorithm is developed to verify whether a (noisy) quantum algorithm is differentially private and automatically generate bugging information when the violation of differential privacy is reported. The information consists of a pair of quantum states that violate the privacy, to illustrate the cause of the violation. Our algorithm is equipped with Tensor Networks, a highly efficient data structure, and executed both on TensorFlow Quantum and TorchQuantum which are the quantum extensions of famous machine learning platforms -- TensorFlow and PyTorch, respectively. The effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm are confirmed by the experimental results of almost all types of quantum algorithms already implemented on realistic quantum computers, including quantum supremacy algorithms (beyond the capability of classical algorithms), quantum machine learning models, quantum approximate optimization algorithms, and variational quantum eigensolvers with up to 21 quantum bits.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Decision Diagrams for Symbolic Verification of Quantum Circuits

With the rapid development of quantum computing, automatic verification of quantum circuits becomes more and more important. While several decision diagrams (DDs) have been introduced in quantum circuit simulation and verification, none of them supports symbolic computation. Algorithmic manipulations of symbolic objects, however, have been identified as crucial, if not indispensable, for several verification tasks. This paper proposes the first decision-diagram approach for operating symbolic objects and verifying quantum circuits with symbolic terms. As a notable example, our symbolic tensor decision diagrams (symbolic TDD) could verify the functionality of the 160-qubit quantum Fourier transform circuit within three minutes. Moreover, as demonstrated on Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm, Grover's algorithm, and the bit-flip error correction code, the symbolic TDD enables efficient verification of quantum circuits with user-supplied oracles and/or classical controls.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Unitarity estimation for quantum channels

Estimating the unitarity of an unknown quantum channel $\mathcal{E}$ provides information on how much it is unitary, which is a basic and important problem in quantum device certification and benchmarking. Unitarity estimation can be performed with either coherent or incoherent access, where the former in general leads to better query complexity while the latter allows more practical implementations. In this paper, we provide a unified framework for unitarity estimation, which induces ancilla-efficient algorithms that use $O(ε^{-2})$ and $O(\sqrt{d}\cdotε^{-2})$ calls to $\mathcal{E}$ with coherent and incoherent accesses, respectively, where $d$ is the dimension of the system that $\mathcal{E}$ acts on and $ε$ is the required precision. We further show that both the $d$-dependence and $ε$-dependence of our algorithms are optimal. As part of our results, we settle the query complexity of the distinguishing problem for depolarizing and unitary channels with incoherent access by giving a matching lower bound $Ω(\sqrt{d})$, improving the prior best lower bound $Ω(\sqrt[3]{d})$ by Aharonov et al. (Nat. Commun. 2022) and Chen et al. (FOCS 2021).

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Fault Models in Superconducting quantum circuits

Fault models are indispensable for many EDA tasks, so as for design and implementation of quantum hardware. In this article, we propose a fault model for superconducting quantum systems. Our fault model reflects the real fault behavior in control signals and structure of quantum systems. Based on it, we conduct fault simulation on controlled-Z gate and quantum circuits by QuTiP. We provide fidelity benchmarks for incoherent faults and test patterns of minimal test repetitions for coherent faults. Results show that with 34 test repetitions a 10% control noise can be detected, which help to save test time and memory.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Differentiable Quantum Programming with Unbounded Loops

The emergence of variational quantum applications has led to the development of automatic differentiation techniques in quantum computing. Recently, Zhu et al. (PLDI 2020) have formulated differentiable quantum programming with bounded loops, providing a framework for scalable gradient calculation by quantum means for training quantum variational applications. However, promising parameterized quantum applications, e.g., quantum walk and unitary implementation, cannot be trained in the existing framework due to the natural involvement of unbounded loops. To fill in the gap, we provide the first differentiable quantum programming framework with unbounded loops, including a newly designed differentiation rule, code transformation, and their correctness proof. Technically, we introduce a randomized estimator for derivatives to deal with the infinite sum in the differentiation of unbounded loops, whose applicability in classical and probabilistic programming is also discussed. We implement our framework with Python and Q#, and demonstrate a reasonable sample efficiency. Through extensive case studies, we showcase an exciting application of our framework in automatically identifying close-to-optimal parameters for several parameterized quantum applications.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Quantum Algorithm for Fidelity Estimation

For two unknown mixed quantum states $ρ$ and $σ$ in an $N$-dimensional Hilbert space, computing their fidelity $F(ρ,σ)$ is a basic problem with many important applications in quantum computing and quantum information, for example verification and characterization of the outputs of a quantum computer, and design and analysis of quantum algorithms. In this paper, we propose a quantum algorithm that solves this problem in $\operatorname{poly}(\log (N), r, 1/\varepsilon)$ time, where $r$ is the lower rank of $ρ$ and $σ$, and $\varepsilon$ is the desired precision, provided that the purifications of $ρ$ and $σ$ are prepared by quantum oracles. This algorithm exhibits an exponential speedup over the best known algorithm (based on quantum state tomography) which has time complexity polynomial in $N$.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Equivalence Checking of Quantum Finite-State Machines

In this paper, we introduce the model of quantum Mealy machines and study the equivalence checking and minimisation problems of them. Two efficient algorithms are developed for checking equivalence of two states in the same machine and for checking equivalence of two machines. As an application, they are used in equivalence checking of quantum circuits. Moreover, the minimisation problem is proved to be in $\textbf{PSPACE}$.

cs.FL↗

arXiv2022

Quantum Random Access Stored-Program Machines

Random access machines (RAMs) and random access stored-program machines (RASPs) are models of computing that are closer to the architecture of real-world computers than Turing machines (TMs). They are also convenient in complexity analysis of algorithms. The relationships between RAMs, RASPs and TMs are well-studied. However, clear relationships between their quantum counterparts are still missing in the literature. We fill in this gap by formally defining the models of quantum random access machines (QRAMs) and quantum random access stored-program machines (QRASPs) and clarifying the relationships between QRAMs, QRASPs and quantum Turing machines (QTMs). In particular, we show that $\textbf{P} \subseteq \textbf{EQRAMP} \subseteq \textbf{EQP} \subseteq \textbf{BQP} = \textbf{BQRAMP}$, where $\textbf{EQRAMP}$ and $\textbf{BQRAMP}$ stand for the sets of problems that can be solved by polynomial-time QRAMs with certainty and bounded-error, respectively. At the heart of our proof, is a standardisation of QTM with an extended halting scheme, which is of independent interest.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2022

Equivalence Checking of Sequential Quantum Circuits

We define a formal framework for equivalence checking of sequential quantum circuits. The model we adopt is a quantum state machine, which is a natural quantum generalisation of Mealy machines. A major difficulty in checking quantum circuits (but not present in checking classical circuits) is that the state spaces of quantum circuits are continuums. This difficulty is resolved by our main theorem showing that equivalence checking of two quantum Mealy machines can be done with input sequences that are taken from some chosen basis (which are finite) and have a length quadratic in the dimensions of the state Hilbert spaces of the machines. Based on this theoretical result, we develop an (and to the best of our knowledge, the first) algorithm for checking equivalence of sequential quantum circuits with running time $\mathcal{O}(2^{3m+5l}(2^{3m}+2^{3l}))$, where $m$ and $l$ denote the numbers of input and internal qubits, respectively. The complexity of our algorithm is comparable with that of the known algorithms for checking classical sequential circuits in the sense that both are exponential in the number of (qu)bits. Several case studies and experiments are presented.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Verifying Fairness in Quantum Machine Learning

Due to the beyond-classical capability of quantum computing, quantum machine learning is applied independently or embedded in classical models for decision making, especially in the field of finance. Fairness and other ethical issues are often one of the main concerns in decision making. In this work, we define a formal framework for the fairness verification and analysis of quantum machine learning decision models, where we adopt one of the most popular notions of fairness in the literature based on the intuition -- any two similar individuals must be treated similarly and are thus unbiased. We show that quantum noise can improve fairness and develop an algorithm to check whether a (noisy) quantum machine learning model is fair. In particular, this algorithm can find bias kernels of quantum data (encoding individuals) during checking. These bias kernels generate infinitely many bias pairs for investigating the unfairness of the model. Our algorithm is designed based on a highly efficient data structure -- Tensor Networks -- and implemented on Google's TensorFlow Quantum. The utility and effectiveness of our algorithm are confirmed by the experimental results, including income prediction and credit scoring on real-world data, for a class of random (noisy) quantum decision models with 27 qubits ($2^{27}$-dimensional state space) tripling ($2^{18}$ times more than) that of the state-of-the-art algorithms for verifying quantum machine learning models.

quant-ph↗