The learnability of unknown quantum measurements

Abstract

© Rinton Press. In this work, we provide an elegant framework to analyze learning matrices in the Schatten class by taking advantage of a recently developed methodology—matrix concentration inequalities. We establish the fat-shattering dimension, Rademacher/Gaussian complexity, and the entropy number of learning bounded operators and trace class operators. By characterising the tasks of learning quantum states and two-outcome quantum measurements into learning matrices in the Schatten-1 and ∞ classes, our proposed approach directly solves the sample complexity problems of learning quantum states and quantum measurements. Our main result in the paper is that, for learning an unknown quantum measurement, the upper bound, given by the fat-shattering dimension, is linearly proportional to the dimension of the underlying Hilbert space. Learning an unknown quantum state becomes a dual problem to ours, and as a byproduct, we can recover Aaronson’s famous result [Proc. R. Soc. A 463, 3089–3144 (2007)] solely using a classical machine learning technique. In addition, other famous complexity measures like covering numbers and Rademacher/Gaussian complexities are derived explicitly under the same framework. We are able to connect measures of sample complexity with various areas in quantum information science, e.g. quantum state/measurement tomography, quantum state discrimination and quantum random access codes, which may be of independent interest. Lastly, with the assistance of general Bloch-sphere representation, we show that learning quantum measurements/states can be mathematically formulated as a neural network. Consequently, classical ML algorithms can be applied to efficiently accomplish the two quantum learning tasks