Quantum computing is powerful because unitary operators describing the
time-evolution of a quantum system have exponential size in terms of the number
of qubits present in the system. We develop a new "Singular value
transformation" algorithm capable of harnessing this exponential advantage,
that can apply polynomial transformations to the singular values of a block of
a unitary, generalizing the optimal Hamiltonian simulation results of Low and
Chuang. The proposed quantum circuits have a very simple structure, often give
rise to optimal algorithms and have appealing constant factors, while usually
only use a constant number of ancilla qubits. We show that singular value
transformation leads to novel algorithms. We give an efficient solution to a
certain "non-commutative" measurement problem and propose a new method for
singular value estimation. We also show how to exponentially improve the
complexity of implementing fractional queries to unitaries with a gapped
spectrum. Finally, as a quantum machine learning application we show how to
efficiently implement principal component regression. "Singular value
transformation" is conceptually simple and efficient, and leads to a unified
framework of quantum algorithms incorporating a variety of quantum speed-ups.
We illustrate this by showing how it generalizes a number of prominent quantum
algorithms, including: optimal Hamiltonian simulation, implementing the
Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse with exponential precision, fixed-point amplitude
amplification, robust oblivious amplitude amplification, fast QMA
amplification, fast quantum OR lemma, certain quantum walk results and several
quantum machine learning algorithms. In order to exploit the strengths of the
presented method it is useful to know its limitations too, therefore we also
prove a lower bound on the efficiency of singular value transformation, which
often gives optimal bounds.Comment: 67 pages, 1 figur