An Exponential Separation Between Quantum Query Complexity and the Polynomial Degree

The degree of a polynomial representing (or approximating) a function f is a lower bound for the number of quantum queries needed to compute f. This observation has been a source of many lower bounds on quantum algorithms. It has been an open problem whether this lower bound is tight. We exhibit a function with polynomial degree M and quantum query complexity \Omega(M^{1.321...}). This is the first superlinear separation between polynomial degree and quantum query complexity. The lower bound is shown by a new, more general version of quantum adversary method.

Polynomial degree vs. quantum query complexity

We study the query complexity of computing a function \(f:\{0,1\}^n\rightarrow \mathbb {R}_+\) in expectation. This requires the algorithm on input \(x\) to output a nonnegative random variable whose expectation equals \(f(x)\), using as few queries to the input \(x\) as possible. We exactly characterize both the randomized and the quantum query complexity by two polynomial degrees, the nonnegative literal degree and the sum-of-squares degree, respectively. We observe that the quantum complexity can be unboundedly smaller than the classical complexity for some functions, but can be at most polynomially smaller for Boolean functions. These query complexities relate to (and are motivated by) the extension complexity of polytopes. The linear extension complexity of a polytope is characterized by the randomized communication complexity of computing its slack matrix in expectation, and the semidefinite (psd) extension complexity is characterized by the analogous quantum model. Since query complexity can be used to upper bound communication complexity of related functions, we can derive some upper bounds on psd extension complexity by constructing efficient quantum query algorithms. As an example we give an exponentially-close entrywise approximation of the slack matrix of the perfect matching polytope with psd-rank only \(2^{n^{1/2+\varepsilon }}\). Finally, we show randomized and quantum query complexity in expectation corresponds to the Sherali-Adams and Lasserre hierarchies, respectively.KeywordsCommunication ComplexityQuery ComplexityExtension ComplexityQuantum QueryQuantum Query ComplexityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The approximate degree of a Boolean function f(x1,x2,…,xn) is the minimum degree of a real polynomial that approximates f pointwise within 1/3. Upper bounds on approximate degree have a variety of applications in learning theory, differential privacy, and algorithm design in general. Nearly all known upper bounds on approximate degree arise in an existential manner from bounds on quantum query complexity.

The approximate degree of a Boolean function $f(x_{1},x_{2},\ldots,x_{n})$ is the minimum degree of a real polynomial that approximates $f$ pointwise within $1/3$. Upper bounds on approximate degree have a variety of applications in learning theory, differential privacy, and algorithm design in general. Nearly all known upper bounds on approximate degree arise in an existential manner from bounds on quantum query complexity. We develop a first-principles, classical approach to the polynomial approximation of Boolean functions. We use it to give the first constructive upper bounds on the approximate degree of several fundamental problems: - $O\bigl(n^{\frac{3}{4}-\frac{1}{4(2^{k}-1)}}\bigr)$ for the $k$-element distinctness problem; - $O(n^{1-\frac{1}{k+1}})$ for the $k$-subset sum problem; - $O(n^{1-\frac{1}{k+1}})$ for any $k$-DNF or $k$-CNF formula; - $O(n^{3/4})$ for the surjectivity problem. In all cases, we obtain explicit, closed-form approximating polynomials that are unrelated to the quantum arguments from previous work. Our first three results match the bounds from quantum query complexity. Our fourth result improves polynomially on the $\Theta(n)$ quantum query complexity of the problem and refutes the conjecture by several experts that surjectivity has approximate degree $\Omega(n)$. In particular, we exhibit the first natural problem with a polynomial gap between approximate degree and quantum query complexity.

In recent years, semidefinite programming has played a vital role in shaping complexity theory and quantum computing. There have been numerous applications ranging from estimating quantum values, over approximating combinatorial quantities, to proving various bounds. This work extends the use of semidefinite programs (SDPs) to proving product rules and to characterizing quantum query complexity. In the first application, we provide a general framework to establishing product rules for quantities that can be expressed (or approximated) using SDPs. We use duality theory to give product rules, which bound the value of the “product” of two problems in terms of their value. Some previous results have implicitly used the properties of SDPs to give such product rules. Here we give sufficient and necessary conditions under which these approaches work, thereby enabling us to capture these previous results under our unified framework. We also include a discussion about alternate definitions of what a “product” means and how they fit into our approach. The second application provides an SDP characterization of quantum query complexity, which is one of the ways in which complexity of a function can be measured. It is known that quantum query complexity can be lower bounded by the so-called “adversary method” which is expressible as a semidefinite program. Recently, Ben Reichardt showed that the adversary method leads to a tight lower bound for boolean functions by converting the solution of this SDP (of adversary method) into an algorithm. We show that a related SDP, called “witness size” in this thesis, provides a tight bound on the quantum query complexity of non boolean functions (total as well as partial). This witness size SDP is also used to give composition results for quantum query complexity. We also show that the witness size is bounded by a constant multiple of the adversary bound. Finally, we briefly explore whether other convex programming paradigms can be useful in complexity theory. One of them is copositive programming. We show that one of the recent result about parallel repetition of unique games, by Barak et.al., can be interpreted as an application of copositive programming.

We show an equivalence between 1-query quantum algorithms and representations by degree-2 polynomials. Namely, a partial Boolean function f is computable by a 1-query quantum algorithm with error bounded by e < 1/2 iff f can be approximated by a degree-2 polynomial with error bounded by e' < 1/2. This result holds for two different notions of approximation by a polynomial: the standard definition of Nisan and Szegedy [21] and the approximation by block-multilinear polynomials recently introduced by Aaronson and Ambainis [1]. The proof uses Grothendieck's inequality to relate two matrix norms, with one norm corresponding to polynomial approximations and the other norm corresponding to quantum algorithms. We also show two results for polynomials of higher degree. First, there is a total Boolean function which requires [EQUATION] quantum queries but can be represented by a block-multilinear polynomial of degree [EQUATION]. Thus, in the general case (for an arbitrary number of queries), block-multilinear polynomials are not equivalent to quantum algorithms. Second, for any constant degree k, the two notions of approximation by a polynomial (the standard and the block-multilinear) are equivalent. As a consequence, we solve an open problem from [1], showing that one can estimate the value of any bounded degree-k polynomial p: {0, 1}n → [-1, 1] with [EQUATION] queries.

We prove a characterization of quantum query algorithms in terms of polynomials satisfying a certain (completely bounded) norm constraint. Based on this, we obtain a refined notion of approximate polynomial degree that equals the quantum query complexity, answering a question of Aaronson et al. (CCC'16). Using this characterization, we show that many polynomials of degree at least 4 are far from those coming from quantum query algorithms. Our proof is based on a fundamental result of Christensen and Sinclair (J. Funct. Anal., 1987) that generalizes the well-known Stinespring representation for quantum channels to multilinear forms. We also give a simple and short proof of one of the results of Aaronson et al. showing an equivalence between one-query quantum algorithms and bounded quadratic polynomials.

Inspired by the Elitzur--Vaidman bomb testing problem (1993), we introduce a new query complexity model, which we call bomb query complexity, $B(f)$. We investigate its relationship with the usual quantum query complexity $Q(f)$, and show that $B(f)=\Theta(Q(f)^2)$. This result gives a new method to derive upper bounds on quantum query complexity: we give a method of finding bomb query algorithms from classical algorithms, which then provide non-constructive upper bounds on $Q(f)=\Theta(\sqrt{B(f)})$. Subsequently, we were able to give explicit quantum algorithms matching our new bounds. We apply this method to the single-source shortest paths problem on unweighted graphs, obtaining an algorithm with $O(n^{1.5})$ quantum query complexity, improving the best known algorithm of $O(n^{1.5}\log n)$ (Dürr et al. 2006, Furrow 2008). Applying this method to the maximum bipartite matching problem gives an algorithm with $O(n^{1.75})$ quantum query complexity, improving the best known (trivial) $O(n^2)$ upper bound. <! footnote> A conference version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of the 30th Computational Complexity Conference, 2015.

It is known that the classical and quantum query complexities of a total Boolean function f are polynomially related to the degree of its representing polynomial, but the optimal exponents in these relations are unknown. We show that the quantum query complexity of f is linearly related to the degree of a non-deterministic polynomial for f. We also prove a quantum-classical gap of 1 vs. N for query complexity for a total f. In the case of quantum communication complexity there is a (partly undetermined) relation between the complexity of f and the logarithm of the rank of its communication matrix. We show that the quantum communication complexity of f is linearly related to the logarithm of the rank of a version of the communication matrix and that it can be exponentially smaller than its classical counterpart.

In decision tree models, considerable attention has been paid on the effect of symmetry on computational complexity. That is, for a permutation group /spl Gamma/, how low can the complexity be for any Boolean function invariant under /spl Gamma/? In this paper, we investigate this question for quantum decision trees for graph properties, directed graph properties, and circular functions. In particular, we prove that the n-vertex Scorpion graph property has quantum query complexity /spl Theta//sup /spl tilde// (n/sup 1/2/), which implies that the minimum quantum complexity for graph properties is strictly less than that for monotone graph properties (known to be /spl Omega/(n/sup 2/3/)). A directed graph property, SINK, is also shown to have the /spl Theta//sup /spl tilde//(n/sup 1/2/) quantum query complexity. Furthermore, we give an N-ary circular function which has the quantum query complexity /spl Theta/ /sup /spl tilde//(N/sup 1/4/). Finally, we show that for any permutation group /spl Gamma/, as long as /spl Gamma/ is transitive, the quantum query complexity of any function invariant to /spl Gamma/ is at least /spl Omega/(N/sup 1/4/), which implies that our examples are (almost) the best ones in the sense of pinning down the complexity for the corresponding permutation group.

The minimum cut problem in an undirected and weighted graph G is to find the minimum total weight of a set of edges whose removal disconnects G. We completely characterize the quantum query and time complexity of the minimum cut problem in the adjacency matrix model. If G has n vertices and edge weights at least 1 and at most τ, we give a quantum algorithm to solve the minimum cut problem using Õ(n^{3/2}√{τ}) queries and time. Moreover, for every integer 1 ≤ τ ≤ n we give an example of a graph G with edge weights 1 and τ such that solving the minimum cut problem on G requires Ω(n^{3/2}√{τ}) queries to the adjacency matrix of G. These results contrast with the classical randomized case where Ω(n²) queries to the adjacency matrix are needed in the worst case even to decide if an unweighted graph is connected or not. In the adjacency array model, when G has m edges the classical randomized complexity of the minimum cut problem is ̃ Θ(m). We show that the quantum query and time complexity are Õ(√{mnτ}) and Õ(√{mnτ} + n^{3/2}), respectively, where again the edge weights are between 1 and τ. For dense graphs we give lower bounds on the quantum query complexity of Ω(n^{3/2}) for τ > 1 and Ω(τ n) for any 1 ≤ τ ≤ n. Our query algorithm uses a quantum algorithm for graph sparsification by Apers and de Wolf (FOCS 2020) and results on the structure of near-minimum cuts by Kawarabayashi and Thorup (STOC 2015) and Rubinstein, Schramm and Weinberg (ITCS 2018). Our time efficient implementation builds on Karger’s tree packing technique (STOC 1996).

Longest common substring (LCS) is an important text processing problem, which has recently been investigated in the quantum query model. The decision version of this problem, LCS with threshold \(d\) , asks whether two length- \(n\) input strings have a common substring of length \(d\) . The two extreme cases, \(d=1\) and \(d=n\) , correspond, respectively to Element Distinctness and Unstructured Search, two fundamental problems in quantum query complexity. However, the intermediate case \(1\ll d\ll n\) was not fully understood. We show that the complexity of LCS with threshold \(d\) smoothly interpolates between the two extreme cases up to \(n^{o(1)}\) factors: — LCS with threshold \(d\) has a quantum algorithm in \(n^{2/3+o(1)}/d^{1/6}\) query complexity and time complexity, and requires at least \(\Omega(n^{2/3}/d^{1/6})\) quantum query complexity. Our result improves upon previous upper bounds \(\widetilde{O}(\min\{n/d^{1/2},n^{2/3}\})\) (Le Gall and Seddighin ITCS 2022, Akmal and Jin SODA 2022), and answers an open question of Akmal and Jin. Our main technical contribution is a quantum speed-up of the powerful String Synchronizing Set technique introduced by Kempa and Kociumaka (STOC 2019). It consistently samples \(n/\tau^{1-o(1)}\) synchronizing positions in the string depending on their length- \(\Theta(\tau)\) contexts, and each synchronizing position can be reported by a quantum algorithm in \(\widetilde{O}(\tau^{1/2+o(1)})\) time. Our quantum string synchronizing set also yields a near-optimal LCE data structure in the quantum setting. As another application of our quantum string synchronizing set, we study the \(k\) -mismatch Matching problem, which asks if the pattern has an occurrence in the text with at most \(k\) Hamming mismatches. Using a structural result of Charalampopoulos et al. (FOCS 2020), we obtain: — \(k\) -mismatch matching has a quantum algorithm with \(k^{3/4}n^{1/2+o(1)}\) query complexity and \(\widetilde{O}(kn^{1/2})\) time complexity. We also observe a non-matching quantum query lower bound of \(\Omega(\sqrt{kn})\) .

K. Iwama and R. Freivalds considered query algorithms where the black box contains a permutation. Since then several authors have compared quantum and deterministic query algorithms for permutations. It turns out that the case of \(n\)-permutations where \(n\) is an odd number is difficult. There was no example of a permutation problem where quantization can save half of the queries for \((2m+1)\)-permutations if \(m\ge 2\). Even for \((2m)\)-permutations with \(m\ge 2\), the best proved advantage of quantum query algorithms is the result by Iwama/Freivalds where the quantum query complexity is \(m\) but the deterministic query complexity is \((2m-1)\). We present a group of \(5\)-permutations such that the deterministic query complexity is 4 and the quantum query complexity is 2.

Quantum query complexity is pivotal in the analysis of quantum algorithms, encompassing well-known examples like search and period-finding algorithms. These algorithms typically involve a sequence of unitary operations and oracle calls dependent on an input variable. In this study, we introduce a variational learning approach to explore quantum query complexity. Our method employs an efficient parameterization of the unitary operations and utilizes a loss function derived from the algorithm’s error probability. We apply this technique to various quantum query complexities, notably devising a new algorithm that resolves the 5-bit Hamming modulo problem with four queries, addressing an open question from Cornelissen et al (2021 arXiv:2112.14682). This finding is corroborated by a semidefinite programming (SDP) approach. Our numerical method exhibits superior memory efficiency compared to SDP and can identify quantum query algorithms (QQAs) that require a smaller workspace register dimension, an aspect not optimized by SDP. These advancements present a significant step forward in the practical application and understanding of QQAs.