Troy Lee

Quantum Query Complexity of State Conversion

State conversion generalizes query complexity to the problem of converting between two input-dependent quantum states by making queries to the input. We characterize the complexity of this problem by introducing a natural information-theoretic norm that extends the Schur product operator norm. The complexity of converting between two systems of states is given by the distance between them, as measured by this norm. In the special case of function evaluation, the norm is closely related to the general adversary bound, a semi-definite program that lower-bounds the number of input queries needed by a quantum algorithm to evaluate a function. We thus obtain that the general adversary bound characterizes the quantum query complexity of any function whatsoever. This generalizes and simplifies the proof of the same result in the case of boolean input and output. Also in the case of function evaluation, we show that our norm satisfies a remarkable composition property, implying that the quantum query complexity of the composition of two functions is at most the product of the query complexities of the functions, up to a constant. Finally, our result implies that discrete and continuous-time query models are equivalent in the bounded-error setting, even for the general state-conversion problem.

Lower Bounds in Communication Complexity

In the 30 years since its inception, communication complexity has become a vital area of theoretical computer science. The applicability of communication complexity to other areas, including circuit and formula complexity, VLSI design, proof complexity, and streaming algorithms, has meant that it has attracted a lot of interest. Lower Bounds in Communication Complexity focuses on showing lower bounds on the communication complexity of explicit functions. It treats different variants of communication complexity, including randomized, quantum, and multiparty models. Many tools have been developed for this purpose from a diverse set of fields including linear algebra, Fourier analysis, and information theory. As is often the case in complexity theory, demonstrating a lower bound is usually the more difficult task. Lower Bounds in Communication Complexity describes a three-step approach for the development and application of these techniques. This approach can be applied in much the same way for different models, be they randomized, quantum, or multiparty. Lower Bounds in Communication Complexity is an ideal primer for anyone with an interest in this current and popular topic.

A Direct Product Theorem for Discrepancy

Discrepancy is a versatile bound in communication complexity which can be used to show lower bounds in randomized, quantum, and even weakly-unbounded error models of communication. We show an optimal product theorem for discrepancy, namely that for any two Boolean functions f, g, disc(f odot g)=thetas(disc(f) disc(g)). As a consequence we obtain a strong direct product theorem for distributional complexity, and direct sum theorems for worst-case complexity, for bounds shown by the discrepancy method. Our results resolve an open problem of Shaltiel (2003) who showed a weaker product theorem for discrepancy with respect to the uniform distribution, discUodot(fodotk)=O(discU(f))k/3. The main tool for our results is semidefinite programming, in particular a recent characterization of discrepancy in terms of a semidefinite programming quantity by Linial and Shraibman (2006).

Improved quantum query algorithms for triangle finding and associativity testing

We show that the quantum query complexity of detecting if an n-vertex graph contains a triangle is

The approximate rank of a matrix and its algorithmic applications: approximate rank

O(n^{9/7})

THE QUANTUM ADVERSARY METHOD AND CLASSICAL FORMULA SIZE LOWER BOUNDS

O(n9/7). This improves the previous best algorithm of Belovs (Proceedings of 44th symposium on theory of computing conference, pp 77–84, 2012) making

Lower Bounds on Quantum Multiparty Communication Complexity

O(n^{35/27})