Learning quantum states prepared by shallow circuits in polynomial time

We give a polynomial time algorithm that, given copies of an unknown quantum state $\vert\psi\rangle=U\vert 0^n\rangle$ that is prepared by an unknown constant depth circuit $U$ on a finite-dimensional lattice, learns a constant depth quantum circuit that prepares $\vert\psi\rangle$. The algorithm extends to the case when the depth of $U$ is $\mathrm{polylog}(n)$, with a quasi-polynomial run-time. The key new idea is a simple and general procedure that efficiently reconstructs the global state $\vert\psi\rangle$ from its local reduced density matrices. As an application, we give an efficient algorithm to test whether an unknown quantum state on a lattice has low or high quantum circuit complexity.

Learning shallow quantum circuits

Despite fundamental interests in learning quantum circuits, the existence of a computationally efficient algorithm for learning shallow quantum circuits remains an open question. Because shallow quantum circuits can generate distributions that are classically hard to sample from, existing learning algorithms do not apply. In this work, we present a polynomial-time classical algorithm for learning the description of any unknown $n$-qubit shallow quantum circuit $U$ (with arbitrary unknown architecture) within a small diamond distance using single-qubit measurement data on the output states of $U$. We also provide a polynomial-time classical algorithm for learning the description of any unknown $n$-qubit state $\lvert \psi \rangle = U \lvert 0^n \rangle$ prepared by a shallow quantum circuit $U$ (on a 2D lattice) within a small trace distance using single-qubit measurements on copies of $\lvert \psi \rangle$. Our approach uses a quantum circuit representation based on local inversions and a technique to combine these inversions. This circuit representation yields an optimization landscape that can be efficiently navigated and enables efficient learning of quantum circuits that are classically hard to simulate.