A Quantum Interior Point Method for LPs and SDPs

We present a quantum interior point method with worst case running time $\widetilde{O}(\frac{n^{2.5}}{\xi^{2}} \mu \kappa^3 \log (1/\epsilon))$ for SDPs and $\widetilde{O}(\frac{n^{1.5}}{\xi^{2}} \mu \kappa^3 \log (1/\epsilon))$ for LPs, where the output of our algorithm is a pair of matrices $(S,Y)$ that are $\epsilon$-optimal $\xi$-approximate SDP solutions. The factor $\mu$ is at most $\sqrt{2}n$ for SDPs and $\sqrt{2n}$ for LP's, and $\kappa$ is an upper bound on the condition number of the intermediate solution matrices. For the case where the intermediate matrices for the interior point method are well conditioned, our method provides a polynomial speedup over the best known classical SDP solvers and interior point based LP solvers, which have a worst case running time of $O(n^{6})$ and $O(n^{3.5})$ respectively. Our results build upon recently developed techniques for quantum linear algebra and pave the way for the development of quantum algorithms for a variety of applications in optimization and machine learning.Comment: 32 page

Statistical Zero Knowledge and quantum one-way functions

One-way functions are a very important notion in the field of classical cryptography. Most examples of such functions, including factoring, discrete log or the RSA function, can be, however, inverted with the help of a quantum computer. In this paper, we study one-way functions that are hard to invert even by a quantum adversary and describe a set of problems which are good such candidates. These problems include Graph Non-Isomorphism, approximate Closest Lattice Vector and Group Non-Membership. More generally, we show that any hard instance of Circuit Quantum Sampling gives rise to a quantum one-way function. By the work of Aharonov and Ta-Shma, this implies that any language in Statistical Zero Knowledge which is hard-on-average for quantum computers, leads to a quantum one-way function. Moreover, extending the result of Impagliazzo and Luby to the quantum setting, we prove that quantum distributionally one-way functions are equivalent to quantum one-way functions. Last, we explore the connections between quantum one-way functions and the complexity class QMA and show that, similarly to the classical case, if any of the above candidate problems is QMA-complete then the existence of quantum one-way functions leads to the separation of QMA and AvgBQP.Comment: 20 pages; Computational Complexity, Cryptography and Quantum Physics; Published version, main results unchanged, presentation improve

Exponential Lower Bound for 2-Query Locally Decodable Codes via a Quantum Argument

A locally decodable code encodes n-bit strings x in m-bit codewords C(x), in such a way that one can recover any bit x_i from a corrupted codeword by querying only a few bits of that word. We use a quantum argument to prove that LDCs with 2 classical queries need exponential length: m=2^{Omega(n)}. Previously this was known only for linear codes (Goldreich et al. 02). Our proof shows that a 2-query LDC can be decoded with only 1 quantum query, and then proves an exponential lower bound for such 1-query locally quantum-decodable codes. We also show that q quantum queries allow more succinct LDCs than the best known LDCs with q classical queries. Finally, we give new classical lower bounds and quantum upper bounds for the setting of private information retrieval. In particular, we exhibit a quantum 2-server PIR scheme with O(n^{3/10}) qubits of communication, improving upon the O(n^{1/3}) bits of communication of the best known classical 2-server PIR.Comment: 16 pages Latex. 2nd version: title changed, large parts rewritten, some results added or improve