Quantum Speedup for Polar Maximum Likelihood Decoding

Conventional decoding algorithms for polar codes strive to balance achievable performance and computational complexity in classical computing. While maximum likelihood (ML) decoding guarantees optimal performance, its NP-hard nature makes it impractical for real-world systems. In this letter, we propose a novel ML decoding architecture for polar codes based on the Grover adaptive search, a quantum exhaustive search algorithm. Unlike conventional studies, our approach, enabled by a newly formulated objective function, uniquely supports Gray-coded multi-level modulation without expanding the search space size compared to the classical ML decoding. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed quantum decoding achieves ML performance while providing a pure quadratic speedup in query complexity.

Grover Adaptive Search with Spin Variables

This paper presents a novel approach to Grover adaptive search (GAS) for a combinatorial optimization problem whose objective function involves spin variables. While the GAS algorithm with a conventional design of a quantum dictionary subroutine handles a problem associated with an objective function with binary variables $\{0,1\}$, we reformulate the problem using spin variables $\{+1,-1\}$ to simplify the algorithm. Specifically, we introduce a novel quantum dictionary subroutine that is designed for this spin-based formulation. A key benefit of this approach is the substantial reduction in the number of CNOT gates required to construct the quantum circuit. We theoretically demonstrate that, for certain problems, our proposed approach can reduce the gate complexity from an exponential order to a polynomial order, compared to the conventional binary-based approach. This improvement has the potential to enhance the scalability and efficiency of GAS, particularly in larger quantum computations.