Unitary Correlation Matrices

Today I’d like to sketch a question that’s been pushing me in a lot of different directions over the past few years — some sane, others less so; few fruitful, but all instructive. The question is motivated by the problem of placing upper bounds on the amount of entanglement needed to play a two-player non-local game (near-)optimally. But it can also be stated as a natural mathematical question in itself, so this is how I’ll present it first, and then only briefly discuss some motivation. (I wish I could write I’ll also present results, but these will be quite sparse.) All that is to come is based on discussions with Oded Regev, though all inaccuracies and naïvetés are mine.

Prelude: Vector Correlation Matrices

Before jumping to unitary correlation matrices, let’s — rather pedantically — introduce vector correlation matrices. Most of you are already familiar with this simple object: a vector correlation matrix is an ${n\times n}$ Hermitian matrix ${C}$ with complex entries such that there exists an integer ${d}$ and unit vectors ${u_1,\ldots,u_n\in {\mathbb C}^d}$ such that ${C_{i,j} = \langle u_i,u_j\rangle}$ for all ${(i,j)\in\{1,\ldots,n\}^2}$. In other words: a Gram matrix with diagonal entries equal to ${1}$.

A natural question is, given a vector correlation matrix ${C}$, what is the minimal dimension ${d}$ in which there exists vectors achieving the specified correlations? Clearly ${d\leq n}$, the dimension of the span of the ${n}$ vectors; moreover the identity matrix implies that ${d=n}$ is sometimes necessary.

If we allow ${\varepsilon}$-approximations, we can do better: the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma implies that ${d=O(\varepsilon^{-2}\log n)}$ is sufficient (and necessary) to find unit vectors such that ${|\langle u_i,u_j\rangle-C_{i,j}|\leq\varepsilon}$ for each ${i,j}$. And if we only require the approximation to hold on the average over the choice of ${i}$ and ${j}$, then no dependence on ${n}$ is necessary: ${d = O(\epsilon^{-2})}$ suffices.

This is all good and well. Now onto the interesting stuff!

Theme: Unitary Correlation Matrices

Define a unitary correlation matrix to be an an ${n\times n}$ Hermitian matrix ${C}$ with complex entries such that there exists an integer ${d}$ and unitary matrices ${U_1,\ldots,U_n\in {\mathbb C}^{d\times d}}$ such that ${C_{i,j} = d^{-1}\textrm{Tr}(U_i U_j^\dagger)}$ for all ${(i,j)\in\{1,\ldots,n\}^2}$. Considering block matrices shows that the set of unitary correlation matrices is convex.

By forgetting the unitary structure of the ${U_i}$ we see that a unitary correlation matrix is automatically a vector correlation matrix; in particular it is positive semidefinite with all diagonal entries equal to ${1}$. While the latter is a characterization of vector correlation matrices, however, as soon as ${n\geq 4}$ (and not before) there exists vector correlation matrices that are not unitary correlation matrices. This is not completely trivial to see, and appears in a paper by Dykema and Juschenko; it is a nice exercise to work out. Now for the main question:

(${\mathfrak{D}}$): Dimension reduction for unitaries. Let ${n\in{\mathbb N}}$ and ${\epsilon > 0 }$ be given. Does there exist an explicit ${d'=d'(n;\epsilon)}$ such that for every ${n\times n}$ unitary correlation matrix ${C}$ there are ${d'}$-dimensional unitaries ${V_1,\ldots,V_n}$ such that

$\displaystyle \Big|\frac{1}{d'}\textrm{Tr}\big(V_i\,V_j^\dagger\big) - C_{i,j} \Big| \leq \varepsilon \qquad \forall (i,j)\in\{1,\ldots,n\}^2\; .$

While the analogue question for vectors is trivial for ${\epsilon=0}$, and a fundamental result in geometry for ${\epsilon>0}$, extremely little is known on the question for unitaries. Virtually the only general statement that can be made is that, at least, some bound ${d'}$ exists. This follows by a simple compactness argument, but does not yield any meaningful bound on the growth of ${d'}$ as a function of ${n}$ and ${\epsilon}$. In fact no explicit bound, however large, is known to hold in general. Let’s explore the problem a bit.

Variatio: Equivalent formulations

A nice feature of question (${\mathfrak{D}}$) is that it is reasonably robust, in the sense that different natural formulations of the question can be shown equivalent, up to simple variations on the precise scaling of ${d'}$. For example, one can relax the constraint of being unitary to the sole requirement that the matrices have all singular values at most ${1}$. At the opposite end of the spectrum one can consider a more structured problem which considers correlations between projection matrices (so all eigenvalues are ${0}$ or ${1}$). Both these variants can be shown equivalent to the unitary case via some simple reductions.

The one variant which makes a substantial difference is the case of correlation matrices with real entries. A beautiful result of Tsirelson shows that any extremal real correlation matrix can be realized exactly, by Hermitian matrices having all eigenvalues ${\{-1,1\}}$,  in dimension ${d' = 2^{\sqrt{\lfloor n/2\rfloor}}}$, and this bound is tight; relatively precise bounds of the form ${d'=2^{\Theta(\epsilon^{-1})}}$ are known for small enough ${\epsilon>0}$. (Note that even though projection matrices are Hermitian, and thus give rise to real correlations, Tsirelson’s result does not imply a positive answer for the case of projections as the dimension-${d'}$ matrices recovered via Tsirelson’s construction will in general be Hermitian, but not projectors, even when the original matrices were.)

Interlude: Motivation

Quantum games. One can arrive at question (${\mathfrak{D}}$) by asking about the minimal dimension of near-optimal strategies in a quantum two-player game. Experts will immediately see the connection, and I will not elaborate on this. Roughly, the easy observation is that correlations that are achievable by entangled players in a nonlocal game take the form

$\displaystyle \langle \psi| A \otimes B |\psi\rangle = \textrm{Tr}(AKB^TK^\dagger),$

where ${|\psi\rangle}$ is a unit vector in ${{\mathbb C}^d \otimes {\mathbb C}^d}$ (the entanglement), ${K}$ is a complex ${d\times d}$ matrix that can be computed from ${|\psi\rangle}$, and ${A,B}$“observables”, i.e. Hermitian operators that square to identity describing the players’ measurement operators. (A more general formulation considers projections, rather than observables.) In case ${|\psi\rangle}$ is the so-called “maximally entangled state”, ${K = d^{-1/2} I}$ and we recover precisely an entry from a correlation matrix. (The case of a general state gives rise to a slight variant of question ${(\mathfrak{D})}$, to which I am not sure whether it is equivalent or not.)
Arriving at the question from this “physical” angle, it seems like it “ought” to have a reasonable answer: certainly, if one fixes the size of the game, and an approximation error ${\epsilon>0}$, then there must exist some dimension that suffices to implement an ${\epsilon}$-optimal strategy. No such result is known. If anything existing signs seem to point in the negative direction: for instance, Slofstra very recently showed that there exists a fixed, constant-sized game such that the optimal winning probability of ${1}$ can only be achieved in the limit of infinite dimension (but it does seem to be the case that, for this game, ${\epsilon}$-optimal strategies can be found in dimension ${\textrm{poly}(\epsilon^{-1}}$). Note that this result implies that the set of correlation matrices of projections is not closed.

Connes’ conjecture. A different, though related, way to arrive at question (${\mathfrak{D}}$) is via the famous “Connes embedding conjecture” in the theory of ${C^*}$ algebras. Connes’ embedding conjecture states, rather informally, that any separable ${II_1}$ factor (i.e. a von Neumann algebra with trivial center that is infinite-dimensional as a vector space, but has a finite faithful trace) embeds into a suitable ultrapower of the hyperfinite factor ${\mathcal{R}}$. Kirchberg showed that the conjecture is equivalent to the following statement.

Theorem. The validity of Connes’ conjecture for some factor ${M}$ is equivalent to the following: For all ${\epsilon>0}$, ${n,k\in{\mathbb N}}$ and unitaries ${U_1,\ldots,U_n\in M}$ there is a ${d'\in{\mathbb N}}$ and unitaries ${V_1,\ldots,V_n\in M_{d'}({\mathbb C})}$, such that

$\displaystyle \Big|\tau\big(U_i\,U_j^*\big)-\frac{1}{d}\textrm{Tr}\big(V_i\,V_j^\dagger\big)\Big|\leq \epsilon,$

where ${\tau}$ is the trace on ${M}$.
This formulation is close to question (${\mathfrak{D}}$), except for two important differences: first, we assume that the target correlations are achievable in finite dimension ${d}$. This makes the problem easier, and would make it trivial if we were not to introduce a second important difference, which is that we ask for explicit bounds on ${d'}$. As a result I do not know of any formal implication between (${\mathfrak{D}}$) and Connes’ conjecture, in either direction.

Graph limits. Finally, for the combinatorialist let me mention an analogous (though, as far I can tell, not directly related) question, formulated by Aldous and Lyons in the context of their study of limits of bounded-degree graphs. The distance between two finite graphs of the same constant degree (but not necessarily the same number of vertices) can be measured via the sampling distance ${\delta}$: ${\delta(G,G') = \sum_{r=1}^\infty 2^{-r}\delta_r(G,G')}$, where ${\delta_r(G,G')}$ denotes the total variation distance between the distributions on rooted ${r}$-neighborhoods obtained by sampling a random vertex from ${G}$ (resp. ${G'}$) and considering the sub-graph induced on all vertices at distance at most ${r}$ from the sampled vertex. With this notion in place, Question 10.1 in Aldous and Lyons’ paper on unimodular random networks asks the following:

(Aldous-Lyons:) For every ${\epsilon>0}$ there is an integer ${d}$ such that for every (finite) graph ${G}$ there is a graph ${G'}$ on ${d}$ vertices such that ${\delta(G,G')\leq \epsilon}$.

In page 1458 the authors mention that the validity of their conjecture for the special class of Cayley graphs would imply that all finitely generated groups are sofic (very roughly, can be embedded into finite-dimensional permutation groups). Even though we do not know of an example of a group that is not sofic, this would be a very surprising result. In particular, it would imply Connes’s Embedding Conjecture for group von Neumann algebras, since the latter is known to hold for sofic groups.

Development: Results

Unfortunately this is going to be one of the shortest, most boring developments in musical history: there is too little to say! I could describe multiple failed attempts. In particular, naïve attempts at dimension reduction, inspired by Johnson-Lindenstrauss or other standard techniques, or incremental “gradient-descent” type of progressive block diagonalization procedures, all seem doomed to fail.

Aside from Tsirelson’s result for real correlation matrices, the one case for which we were able to find a cute proof is the case of permutation correlation matrices, where each ${U_i}$ is assumed to be a permutation matrix. The fact that permutations are sparse seems to make it easier to operate on them by “shifting entries around”; unitaries have a more rigid structure. The proof uses a simple combinatorial argument, with the heaviest hammer being Hall’s theorem guaranteeing the existence of a perfect matching, which is used to simultaneously re-organize the “${1}$” entries in a subset of the permutation matrices while preserving all correlations. The upper bound on ${d'}$ we obtain is of order ${2^n/\varepsilon^2}$, which may be the right order.

More is known in terms of negative results, i.e. lower bounds on ${d'}$. Such bounds abound in the theory of nonlocal games, where they go by the name of “dimension witness”. The best known results I am aware of imply that ${d'}$ should grow at least like ${\min(2^{\Omega(\epsilon^{-1})},2^n)}$, which is good for very small ${\epsilon}$, and also ${d'=\Omega(n^c)}$, which holds for ${\epsilon}$ smaller than a universal constant (the two bounds are obtained from different families of correlations; see here for the former and here for the latter). An interesting consequence of the (proof of) the second bound, which appears in joint work with Natarajan, is that even an ${\varepsilon}$-approximation on average (over the entries of C) requires large dimension. This implies that no “oblivious” rounding technique, as in the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma, will work: such a technique would guarantee small approximation error on average independently of ${n}$.

Coda

There has been a lot of progress recently on lower bounds, stimulated by works on quantum non-local games. This includes a beautiful framework of games for checking “non-commutative” analogues of linear equations over ${\mathbb{F}_2}$, developed by Cleve and Mittal and Ji; extensions of the framework to testing finitely presented groups by Slofstra; a development of approaches based on operator systems by Paulsen and co-authors, and many others. But no upper bounds! Get to work: things can’t remain this way.

Posted in Conferences, Quantum, Science, Uncategorized | | 2 Comments

Quid qPCP?

This blog has already seen three posts on the quantum PCP conjecture: in February 2013 to highlight several talks at the Simons Institute in Berkeley, in October 2013 to promote a survey on the topic I wrote with Dorit Aharonov and Itai Arad, and in October 2014 to introduce the two main variants “constraint satisfaction” (CSP) and “multiplayer games” (MIP), of the quantum QCP (qPCP) conjecture. Such a high rate of posting (compared to the average frequency of posts on this blog) might indicate a slight obsession. But you may also notice it’s been…two years! Has no result worthy of note been established since? Certainly not, and although the conjecture still stands strong, there have been a few interesting developments on both variants of the conjecture. In this post I’ll discuss a couple results on the CSP-qPCP. In a follow-up post I’ll describe progress on the MIP-qPCP.

When we wrote the survey three summers ago, the latest word on the CSP-qPCP (see Conjecture 1.3 here for a precise formulation) had been given in a paper by Brandao and Harrow. BH showed, using information-theoretic arguments, that the constraint graphs associated with constant-gap QMA-hard instances of the local Hamiltonian problem had to satisfy “non-expansion” requirements seemingly at odds with the expansion properties of graphs associated with what are often considered the hardest instances of classical CSPs. Intuitively, their argument uses the monogamy of quantum correlations to argue that highly expanding constraint graphs place such strong demands on entanglement that there is always a product state whose energy is not far from the minimum. Although not strictly a no-go result, their theorem indicates that QMA-hard instances must be based on constraint graphs with markedly different spectral properties than those associated with the hardest instances of classical CSP.

For the time being it seems like any proof, or disproof, of the conjecture remains out of reach. Instead of focusing directly on qPCP, it may be more fruitful to develop the objects that are expected to play an important role in the proof, such as (quantum) low-density parity check codes (qLDPC) and (quantum) locally testable codes (qLTC). Two recent works make progress on this front.

The NLETS conjecture

The no low-energy trivial states (NLTS) conjecture was proposed by Freedman and Hastings as a “complexity-free” analogue of CSP-qPCP. The NLTS conjecture states that there exist local Hamiltonians such that all low-energy (within an additive constant, times the norm of the Hamiltonian, from the minimum) states are “non-trivial”, in the sense that they cannot be generated by a constant-depth quantum circuit applied on a product state. Equivalently, all states that are the output of a constant-depth quantum circuit must have energy a constant above the minimum. NLTS Hamiltonian are good candidates for qPCP as they provide local Hamiltonian for which many obvious classical certificates for the minimal energy of the Hamiltonian (such as the description of a small circuit which generates a low-energy state) are essentially ruled out.

An earlier version of the Eldar-Harrow manuscript claimed a construction of NLTS Hamiltonian, but the paper was recently updated, and the claim retracted. The current manuscript establishes a moderately weaker (though strictly incomparable) result, that the authors call NLETS, for “no low-error trivial states”. The main result of EH is a relatively simple, explicit construction of a family of local Hamiltonians that have no non-trivial “ground state ${\varepsilon}$-impostor”. An ${\varepsilon}$-impostor is a state that has the same reduced density matrix as a ground state on a fraction ${(1-\varepsilon)}$ of the qubits, but may differ arbitrarily on the remaining ${\varepsilon}$ fraction. Using that the Hamiltonian is local, impostors necessarily have low energy, but the converse is not true, so that NLETS rules out non-triviality for a more restricted class of states than NLTS. For that restricted class of states, however, the non-triviality established by EH is sronger than required by NLTS: they show that no ${\varepsilon}$-impostor can even be well-approximated (within inverse-polynomial trace distance) by logarithmic-depth, instead of just constant-depth, quantum circuits.

Let’s see if I can give some basic intuition on their construction; for anything substantial see the paper, which gives many angles on the result. Consider first first a classical repetition code encoding ${1}$ bit into ${n}$ bits. This can be made into a locally testable code by enforcing pairwise equality of bits along the edges of a constant-degree expanding graph on vertex set ${\{1,\ldots,n\}}$. Now allow me a little leap of faith: imagine there existed a magic quantum analogue of this classical repetition code, where equality between pairs of qubits is enforced not only in the ${Z}$ (computational) basis, but also in the ${X}$ (Hadamard) basis. Of course such a thing does not exist: the constraints would force any pair of qubits (linked by the expander) to form an EPR pair, a requirement that strongly violates monogamy. But let’s imagine. Then I claim that we would essentially be done. Why? We need two more observations.

The first key observation made by EH is that any ground state of this imaginary code would have the following property: if you measure all qubits of the state in the same basis, either ${X}$ or ${Z}$, then for at least one of the two possible choices the measurement outcomes will be distributed according to a distribution on ${n}$-bit strings that places a large (constant) weight on at least two well-isolated (separated by at least the minimum distance) subsets of the Hamming cube. Note that this does not hold of the classical repetition code: the distribution which all-${0}$ codeword is, well, concentrated. But if we were to measure the associated quantum state ${|0\cdots 0 \rangle \simeq \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}( |+\cdots+\rangle+|-\cdots-\rangle)}$ in the Hadamard basis, we would get a very spread distribution, with constant mass on two sets that are at distance ${n}$ apart (I realize the equation I wrote is not quite correct! Don’t think too hard about it; obviously my “magical quantum repetition code” does not exist). The reason the distribution obtained in at least one of the two bases must be spread out is due to the uncertainty principle: if the distribution is localized in the ${X}$ basis it must be delocalized in the ${Z}$ basis, and vice-versa. And the reason it should be concentrated on isolated clumps is that we are measuring a codeword, which, for our magic example, can only lead to outcomes that are supported on the set ${\{|0\rangle^{\otimes n},|1\rangle^{\otimes n},|+\rangle^{\otimes n},|-\rangle^{\otimes n}\}}$.

To conclude we need the second observation, which is that trivial states do not have this property: measuring a trivial state in any product basis will always lead to a highly expanding distribution, which in particular cannot have large mass on well-isolated subsets. This is obviously true for product states, and requires a bit of work to be carried through logarithmically many layers of a quantum circuit; indeed this is where the main technical work of the paper lies.

So the argument is complete…except for the fact that the required magic quantum repetition code does not exist! Instead, HE find a good make-do by employing a beautiful construction of quantum LDPC codes due to Tillich and Zemor, the “hypergraph product”. The hypergraph product takes as input any pair of classical linear codes and returns a quantum “product” CSS code whose locality, distance and rate properties can be related to those of the original codes. The toric code can be case as an example of a hypergraph product code; see Section 3 in the paper for explanations. Unfortunately, the way the distance of the product code scales with other parameters prevents TZ from obtaining good enough qLDPC for the CSP-QPCP; they can “only” obtain codes with constant weight and constant rate, but distance ${O(\sqrt{n})}$.

In the context of NL(E)TS, and even more so qPCP, however, distance may not be the most relevant parameter. EH’s main construction is obtained as the hypergraph product of two expander-based repetition codes, which as a code only has logarithmic distance; nevertheless they are able to show that the robustness derived from the repetition code, together with the logarithmic distance, are enough to separate ${\varepsilon}$-impostors from logarithmic-depth trivial states.

Quantum LDPC & LTC

Quantum low-density parity-check codes (qLDPC) already made a showing in the previous sections. These families of codes are of much broader interest than their possible role in a forthcoming proof of qPCP, and constructions are being actively pursued. For classical codes the situation is largely satisfactory, and there are constructions that simultaneously achieve constant rate and linear distance with constant-weight parity checks. For quantum codes less is known. If we insist on constant-weight stabilizers then the best distance is ${\Omega(\sqrt{n}\log^{1/4} n)}$ (e.g. Freedman et al.), a notch above the TZ construction mentioned earlier. The most local construction that achieves linear distance requires stabilizers of weight ${O(\sqrt{n})}$ (e.g. Bravyi and Hastings).

A recent paper by Hastings makes progress on constructions of qLDPC – assuming a geometrical conjecture on the volume of certain surfaces defined from lattices in ${{\mathbb R}^n}$. Assuming the conjecture, Hastings shows the existence of qLDPC with ${n^{1-\varepsilon}}$ distance and logarithmic-weight stabilizers, a marked improvement over the state of the art. Although as discussed earlier even linear-distance, constant-weight, qLDPC would not imply the CSP-qPCP nor NLTS (the resulting Hamiltonian may still have low-energy eigenstates that are not at a small distance from codewords), by analogy with the classical case (and basic intuition!), constructions of such objects should certainly facilitate any attempt at a proof of the conjectures. Moreover, qLDPC suffice for the weaker NLETS introduced by EH, as the latter only makes a statement about ${\varepsilon}$-impostors, i.e. states that are at a constant distance from codewords. To obtain the stronger implication to NLTS, the proper notion is that of local testability: errors should be detected by a fraction of parity checks proportional to the distance of the error from the closest codeword (and not just some parity check).

Hastings’ construction follows the topological approach to quantum error correcting codes pioneered by Freedman and Kitaev. Although the latter introduced codes whose properties depend on the surface they are embedded in, at best I could tell the formal connection between homology and error correction is made in a comprehensive paper by Bombin and Martin-Delgado. The advantage of this approach is that properties of the code, including rate and distance, can be tied to geometric properties of the underlying homology, reducing the construction of good codes to that of manifolds with the right properties.

In addition to the (conjectural) construction of good qLDPC, almost as an afterthought Hastings provides an unconditional construction of a quantum locally testable code (qLTC), albeit one which encodes two qubits only. Let’s try to visualize this, starting from the helpful warm-up provided by Hastings, a high-dimensional, entangled, locally-testable code…which encodes zero qubit (the code space is one-dimensional). Of course this is trivial, but it’s a warm-up!

The simplest instance to visualize has six physical qubits. To follow the forthcoming paragraphs, take a piece of paper and draw a large tetrahedron. If you didn’t mess up your tetrahedron should have six edges: these are your qubits. Now the parity checks are as follows. Each of the four faces specifies an ${X}$-stabilizer which acts on the three edges forming the face. Each of the four vertices specifies a ${Z}$-stabilizer which acts on the three edges that touch the vertex. The resulting eight operators pairwise commute, and they specify a unique (entangled) state in the ${2^6}$-dimensional physical space.

Next we’d like to understand “local” testability. This means that if we fix a set ${O}$ of edges, and act on each of them using an ${X}$ error, then the resulting operator should violate (anti-commute) with a fraction of ${Z}$-stabilizers that is proportional to the reduced weight of the error, i.e. its distance to the closest operator which commutes with all ${Z}$-stabilizers. To see which stabilizers “detect” the error ${O}$, we recall that ${Z}$ and ${X}$ which overlap at an even number of locations commute. Therefore a ${Z}$ stabilizer will detect ${O}$ if and only if it lies in its boundary ${\partial O}$: the set of vertices which touch an odd number of edges in ${O}$. This is our syndrome; it has a certain cardinality. To conclude we need to argue that ${O}$ can be modified into a set ${O+P}$ with no boundary, ${\partial(O+P)=\emptyset}$, and such that ${P}$ is as small as possible – ideally, it should involve at most as many edges as the size of the boundary ${|\partial O|}$. Here is how Hastings does it: for each vertex in the boundary, introduce an edge that links it to some fixed vertex – say the top-most one in your tetrahedron. Let ${P}$ be the resulting set of edges. Then you can check (on the picture!) that ${O+P}$ is boundary-less. Since we added at most as many edges as vertices in the boundary (if the top-most vertex was part of the boundary it doesn’t contribute any edge), we have proven local testability with respect to ${X}$ errors; ${Z}$ errors are similar.

This was all in three dimensions. The wonderful thing is that the construction generalizes in a “straightforward” way to ${n}$ dimensions. Consider an ${(n+1)}$-element universe ${U=\{1,\ldots,n+1\}}$. Qubits are all subsets of ${U}$ of size ${q=(n+1)/2}$; there are exponentially many of these. ${Z}$-stabilizers are defined for each ${(q-1)}$-element subset; each acts on all ${(q+1)}$ of its ${q}$-element supersets. Symmetrically, ${X}$-stabilizers are defined for each ${(q+1)}$-element set; each acts on all ${(q+1)}$ of its ${q}$-element subsets. Thus the code is local: each stabilizer has weight ${(q+1)}$, which is logarithmic in the number of qubits. It remains to check local testability; this follows using precisely the same argument as above (minus the picture…).

This first construction encodes zero qubits. How about getting a couple? Hastings gives a construction achieving this, and remains (poly-logarithmically) locally testable. The idea, very roughly, is to make a toric code by combining together two copies of the code described above. The number of encoded qubits will become non-trivial and local testability will remain. Unfortunately, just as for the toric code, the distance of the result code only scales as ${\sqrt{n}}$. To construct his code Hastings uses a slightly different cellulation than the above-described one. I am not sure precisely why the change is needed, and I defer to the paper for more details. (Leverrier, Tillich and Zemor had earlier provided a construction, based on the TZ hypergraph product, with linear rate, square root distance, and local testability up to the minimal distance, i.e. for all errors of reduced weight at most ${O(\sqrt{n})}$.)

Although the geometric picture takes some effort to grasp, I find these constructions fascinating. Given the Brandao-Harrow objections to using the most “straighforward” expander constructions to achieve CSP-qPCP, or even NLTS, it seems logical to start looking for combinatorial structures that have more subtle properties and lie at the delicate boundary where both robustness (in terms of testability) and entanglement (non-triviality of ground states) can co-exist without challenging monogamy.

Posted in QPCP, Quantum, Science, Uncategorized | | 2 Comments

QCryptoX: post-mortem

Our EdX/Delft/Caltech course on quantum cryptography officially ended on Dec. 20th, and is now archived (all material should remain available in the foreseeable future; we will also prepare a self-contained version of the lecture notes). At Caltech, the “flipped classroom” ended a couple weeks earlier; by now all grades are in and the students may even be beginning to recover. How did it go?

1. In the classroom

Fifteen Caltech students, with a roughly equal mix of physics/CS/EE backgrounds, followed the course till the end (we started at ~20). We had a great time, but integration with the online course proved more challenging than I anticipated. Let me say why, in the hope that my experience could be useful to others (including myself, if I repeat the course).

The EdX content was released in 10 weekly updates, on Tuesdays. Since on-campus classes took place Tuesdays and Thursdays, I asked Caltech students to review the material (videos+lecture notes+quizzes) made available online on a given Tuesday by the following Tuesday’s class. I would then be able to structure the class under the assumption that the students had at least some minimal familiarity with the weeks’ concepts. This would allow for a more relaxed, “conversational” mode: I would be able to react to difficulties encountered by the students, and engage them in the exploration of more advanced topics. That was the theory. Some of it worked out, but not quite as well as I had hoped, and this for a variety of reasons:

1. There was a large discrepancy in the students’ level of preparation. Some had gone through lecture notes in detail, watched all videos, and completed all quizzes. Although some aspects of the week’s material might still puzzle them, they had a good understanding of the basics. But other students had barely pulled up the website, so that they didn’t even really know what topics were covered in a given week. This meant that, if I worked under the assumption that students already had a reasonable grasp of the material, I would loose half the class; whereas if I assumed they had not seen it at all I would put half the class to sleep. As an attempted remedy I enforced some minimal familiarity with the online content by requiring that weekly EdX quizzes be turned in each Tuesday before class. But these quizzes were not hard, and the students could (and did) get away with a very quick scan through the material.
2. As all students, but, I hear, even more so here, Caltech undergraduates generally (i) do not show up in class, and (ii) if per chance they happen to land in the right classroom, they certainly won’t participate. In an attempt to encourage attendance  I made homeworks due right before the Tuesday 10:30am class, the idea being that students would probably turn in homeworks at the last minute, but then they would at least be ready for class. Bad idea: as a result, students ended up spending the night on the homework, dropping it off at 10:29:59… only to skip class so as to catch up on sleep!Slightly over half of the registered students attended any given class, a small group of 8-10 on average. This made it harder to keep participation up. On the whole it still went pretty well, and with a little patience, and insistence, I think I eventually managed to instore a reasonably relaxed atmosphere, where students would naturally raise questions, submit suggestions, etc. But we did not reach the stage of all-out participation I had envisioned.

Given these observations on what went wrong (or at least sub-optimally), here are a few thoughts on how the course could be improved, mostly for my own benefit (I hope to put some of these to good practice in a year or two!). This should be obvious, but: the main hurdle in designing a “flipped classroom” is to figure out how to work with the online content:

• First there is a scheduling difficulty. Some students complained that by having to go through the weekly videos and lecture notes prior to the discussion of the material in class they simultaneously had to face two weeks’ worth of content at any given time. Scheduling of online material was decided based on other constraints, and turned out to be highly sub-optimal: each week was released on a Tuesday, which was also the first day of class, so that it was unreasonable to ask the students to review the material before that week’s classes….pushing it to the next week, and resulting in the aforementioned overlap. A much better schedule would have been to e.g. release material online on Friday, and then have class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This would have led to a larger overlap and less schizophrenia.
• Then comes the problem of “complementarity”. What can be done in class that does not replicate, but instead enriches, then online material? This is made all the more difficult by the inevitable heterogeneity in the student’s preparation. An effort has to be made to limit this by finding ways to enforce the student’s learning of the material. For instance, each class could be kick-started by a small presentation by one of the students, based on one of the online problems, or even by re-explaining (or, explaining better!) one of the week’s more challenging videos. This should be made in a way that the students find it valuable, both for the presenter and the listeners; I don’t want the outcome to be that no one shows up for class.
• Student-led discussions usually work best. They love to expose their ideas to each other, and improve upon them. This forces them to be active, and creative. The best moments in the class where when the discussion really picked up and the students bounced suggestions off each other. The existence of the online material should facilitate this, by giving a common basis on which to base the discussion. My approach this time wasn’t optimal, but based on the experience I think it is possible to do something truly engaging. But it won’t work by itself; one really has to design incentive-based schemes to get the process going.

2. Online

Success of the online course is rather hard to judge. At the end of the course there were about 8000 officially registered students. Of these, EdX identified ~500 as “active learners” over the last few weeks (dropping from ~1500 over the first few weeks, as is to be expected). I think an active learner is roughly someone who has at least watched some parts of a video, answered a quizz or problem, participated in a forum, etc.
About 100 students pursued an official certificate, which means that they paid ~50\$ to have their success in the course officially registered. I couldn’t figure out how many students have actually “passed” the class, but I expect the number to be around 200: most of the certified students plus a few others who didn’t want to pay for the certificate but still turned in most homeworks. This is a fair number for a challenging specialized course, I am pretty happy with it. The high initial enrollment numbers, together with anecdotal evidence from people who got in touch directly, indicate that there certainly is demand for the topic.  The most active students in the course definitely “wanted in”, and we had lots of good questions on the forum. And, many, many typos were fixed!

How satisfied were the students with the course? We ran an “exit survey”, but I don’t have the results yet; I can write about them later (hoping that a significant enough number of students bother to fill in the survey). We also had  pre- and mid-course survey. Some of the more interesting questions had to do with how students learn. In my opinion this is the main challenge in designing a MOOC: how to make it useful? Will the students learn anything by watching videos? Anecdotal evidence (but also serious research, I hear) suggests not. Reading the lecture notes? Maybe, but that requires time and dedication – basically, to be an assiduous learner already. Just as “in-the-classroom” learning, it is the problem-solving that students are brought to engage in that can make a difference. Students like to be challenged; they need to be given an active role. In the mid-course survey many of the positive comments had to do with “Julia lab” assignments that were part of the course, and for which the students had to do some simple coding that let them  experiment with properties of qubits, incompatible measurements, etc. In the pre-course survey students also indicated a marked preference for learning via solving problems rather than by watching videos.

So a good online MOOC should be one that actively engages the student’s problem-solving skills. But this is not easy! Much harder than recording a video in front of a tablet & webcam. Even though I was repeatedly told about it before-hand, I learned the lesson the hard way: homework questions have to be vetted very thoroughly. There is no end to a student’s creativity in misinterpreting a statement – let alone 1000 students’. Multiple-choice questions may sound straightforward, but they’re not: one has to be very careful that there is exactly one straight correct answer, while at the same time not making it too obvious which is that answer; when one has a solution in mind it is easy not to realize that other proposed supposedly wrong solutions could in fact be interpreted as correct. The topic of cryptography makes this particularly tricky: we want the students to reason, be creative, devise attacks, but the multiple-choice limits us in this ability. Luckily we had a very dedicated, and creative, team of TAs, both in Delft and In Caltech, and by working together they compiled quite a nice set of problems; I hope they get used and re-used.

3. Conclusions

It’s too early (or too late) for conclusions. This was a first, and I hope there’ll be a second. The medium is a challenge, but it’s worth reaching out: we teach elite topics to elite students at elite institutions, but so many more have the drive, interest, and ability to learn the material that it would be irresponsible to leave them out. MOOCs may not be the best way to expand the reach of our work, but it is one way…to be improved!

It was certainly a lot of fun. I owe a huge thank you to all the students, in the classroom and online, who suffered through the course. I hope you learned a lot! Second in line were the TAs, at Caltech as well as Delft, who did impressive work, coping simultaneously with the heavy online and offline duties. They came up with a great set of resources. Last but not least, behind the scenes, the video production and online learning teams, from Delt and Caltech, without whose support none of this would have been made possible. Thanks!

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Two weeks in

Our course on quantum cryptography will soon enter its third week of instruction (out of ten weeks planned). My parallel “in-class” course at Caltech has already gone through four weeks of lectures. How is it going so far?

There are many possible measures against which to evaluate the experience. An easy one is raw numbers. Online there are a bit over 7,200 students enrolled. But how many are “active”? The statistics tools provided by EdX report 1995 “active” students last week – under what definition of “active”? EdX also reports that 1003 students “watched a video”, and 861 “tried a problem”. What is an active student who neither watched a video nor tried a problem – they clicked on a link? In any case, the proportion seems high; from what I heard a typical experience is that about 2-5% of registered students will complete any given online course. Out of 7,000, this would bring the number of active students by the end of the course at at a couple hundred, a number I would certainly consider a marked success, given the specialized topic and technically challenging material.

At Caltech there are 20 students enrolled in CS/Phys 120. Given the size of our undergraduate population I also consider this to be a rather high number (but the hard drop deadline has not passed yet!). It’s always a pleasure to see our undergraduate’s eagerness to dive into any exciting topic of research that is brought to their attention. I don’t know the enrollment for TU Delft, but they have a large program in quantum information so the numbers are probably at least twice as high.

Numbers are numbers. How about enthusiasm? You saw the word cloud we collected in Week 0. Here is one from Week 2 (“What does “entanglement” evoke in you right now?”; spot the “love” and “love story”; unfortunately only 1% of responses for either!). Some of the students speak up when prompted for simple feedback such as this, but the vast majority remain otherwise silent, so that involvement is hard to measure. We do have a few rather active participants in the discussion forums, and it’s been a pleasure to read and try to answer their creative questions each day – dear online learners, if you read this, thanks for your extremely valuable comments and feedback, which help make the course better for everyone! It’s amazing how even as we were learning qubits some rather insightful questions, and objections, were raised. It’s clear that people are coming to the course from a huge range of backgrounds, prompting the most unexpected reactions.

A similar challenge arises in the classroom. Students range from the freshmen with no background in quantum information (obviously), nor in quantum mechanics or computer science, to more advanced seniors (who form the bulk of the class) to graduate students in Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM). How to capture everyone’s attention, interest, imagination? The topic of cryptography helps -there is so much to be fascinated with. I started the course by discussing the problem of quantum money, which has the advantage of easily capturing one’s imagination, and for which there is a simple quantum scheme with a clear advantage over classical (cherry on top, the scheme is based on the famous “BB84 states” that will play a major role in the class via their use for quantum key distribution). So newcomers to quantum information could learn about qubits, kets and bras, while others could fend off their impatience by imagining new schemes for public-coin quantum money.

This is not an easy line to thread however, and given the composition of the class I eventually decided to err on the side of caution. Don’t repeat it, but this is my first time even teaching a full class on quantum information, and the basic concepts, not to mention the formalism, can be quite tricky to pick up. So we’re going to take it slow, and we’ll see how far we get. My hope is that the “flipped classroom” format should help needy but motivated students keep afloat by making all the online material available before it is discussed in class. Since the online course has only been going on for a couple weeks I can’t yet report on how well this will work out; my initial impression is that it is not given that the in-class students actually do spend enough time with the online material. I am yet to find the proper way to incentivize this: quizzes? rewards? The best reward should be that they manage to follow the course 😉

In the coming weeks we’ll start making our way towards quantum key distribution and its analysis. Entanglement, measuring uncertainty, privacy amplification, BB84 and Eckert, and device independence. Quite a program, and it’s certainly nice to attempt it in such pleasant company!

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One week later…

…and 736 words of expectation for the class:

Note the top contender: let’s see if we live up to their expectations!

It’s been a fun first week. We released “Week 0” of the material a month ahead of the official start date, so that those students not yet familiar with the basics of quantum information (what is a qubit?) would have enough time to digest the fundamental notions we’ll be using throughout. (Out of the ~5500 registered students, ~1250 are currently marked my EdX as “active” and 560 have watched at least one video. Keep it coming!)

An unexpected benefit of opening up the platform ahead of time is that it is giving us the time to experiment with (read: debug) some of the tools we plan to use throughout. A first is EdX’s own possibilities for interaction with the students, an example of which is pictured above (“Use the space below to enter a few words that best characterize your expectations for this class”).But we’re also using a couple add-ons:

The first is a system replacing EdX’s discussion forums,called Askalot. Cute name – how can you resist. The main benefit of Askalot is that it provides more structure to the discussions, which can be characterized as question/bug report/social discussion/etc, can be up/down-voted, marked as correct/invalidated by the instructors, etc. The students are having fun already, introducing themselves, complaining about bugs in the quizzes, and, of course, about Askalot itself! (Thanks go to Ivan Srba, one of the creators of Askalot, for being extremely responsive and fixing a host of minor bugs overnight – not to mention throwing in the extra feature requested by the students.)

A second is called DALITE. The idea of DALITE is to encourage students to provide an explanation justifying their answer to a question. Indeed, one of the drawbacks of the online platform is the need for automatic grading of assignments, which greatly limits how the student can be engaged in the problem-solving exercise, mostly limited to multiple-choice or simple numeric answers. DALITE (which grew out of, and is still, a serious research project in online learning) introduces a fun twist: the student is asked to type in a “rationale” for her choice. Of course there is no way we could grade such rationales. But here is the idea: once the student has entered her explanation, she is shown the rationale provided by another student (or the instructor) for a different answer, and asked whether she would like to reconsider her decision. The student can choose to change her mind, or stick with her initial choice; she is asked to explain why. It’s really fun to watch the answers provided (“What would happen if quantum mechanics allowed cloning of arbitrary states?”), the change of minds that take place, and the rationale that incentivized said change of mind. (Thanks to Sameer Bhatagnar for helping us set up the tool and explaining its many possibilities, and to Joseph Williams for suggesting its use in the first place.)

We’ll see how these pan out in the longer run. I’m definitely eager to experiment with ways to make the MOOC experience a better learning experience for the students. I’ll let you know how it goes. Suggestions welcome!

PS: 47% students 25 and under, 78% from outside US, is good, but 16% female is not…come on!

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Coming to a theater near you

This Fall together with long-time friend and collaborator Stephanie Wehner I will be teaching a Caltech/TUDelft/EdX course on Quantum Cryptography. As I am writing this I almost feel like saying I have taught an EdX course…indeed, I just finished recording the last video for the course! Let me tell you right away that, when you’ll eventually get to see this fool absurdly gesticulating in front of at tablet, well – it was no small effort! (Not only mine: I’ll have a chance to return to this, but a serious hat tip to the Caltech production team is already in order.) This is the first post of a few in which I plan to share my experience preparing for, and then running, the course (which is officially starting on October 10th).

Why?

More often than not the first question I get asked is – why? Why did you decide to do this?? As a teacher you’re used to torturing a couple dozen students each semester… but now, not only do you want to ramp it up and torture thousands at a time, but you also want to torture yourself???

Let’s see. I can find at least two reasons. The first is rather selfish: I’m curious. I want to give it a try. My interest in the possibilities of online education, as is the case for many of us, started around 2011, during the “big boom” that followed the success of Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig’s Artificial Intelligence MOOC at Stanford. It is through discussing the experience of my Ph.D. advisor, Umesh Vazirani, who taught one of the early MOOCs (and still the only one on quantum computing), that I got more seriously interested in the medium. As everything he does, Umesh took the course deep at heart, and taught it passionately, striving to pack his signature “nuggets” of insight into the rigid format of a 10-minute video meant to be accessed “massively online”. Umesh had great hopes for the medium, and his course was wildly successful. It has certainly been cited as their main source of education in quantum information by many a Caltech Ph.D. applicant!

Recognize anyone?

I have the impression that the initial explosion of interest in MOOCs that took place in 2012-1014 has subsided somewhat, and the medium may be going through a phase of soul-searching: given that it is now clear MOOCs will not cure all the world’s ills, can they at least be useful for something? The “online education” medium certainly has its own challenges. As a friend working in the psychology of learning put it somewhat bluntly, “students don’t learn anything from videos – don’t waste your time” (too late, Joseph – I had started recording already). There is some truth to this (though as long as we don’t forget the 2x button there’s still a chance the students might condescend to skimming through some fraction of the videos in a quick hunt for hints towards the pset solutions).

The point though is that broadly interpreted “online education” should have much more potential for engaging the students than simply dumping video clips on them . This is what I’m interested in exploring: the extent to which it is possible to set up a stimulating, useful interactive process for the students, with some necessary “downtime” spent reading notes and working problems on their own, and some “uptime” spent watching videos but also participating in forums, thinking through stimulating questions, checking out other student’s answers, etc.

The second reason is perhaps less self-centered. I think we picked the right topic. A two-word title, each of which bound to associate with a whole range of exciting, if nebulous, concepts in the mind of any young apprentice-scientist, what is not to like? Quantum cryptography has recently (and somewhat justifiably) been drawing a lot of attention, from the expanding range of start-ups to the NSA through Chinese rockets. But surprisingly few resources are available to whomever seeks a serious introduction to the subject. While great books on quantum computing and quantum information are popping up, none gives much attention to quantum cryptography. is no book on quantum cryptography, few if any lecture notes (I searched, and the only consistent notes I could find are from a course taught by Unruh in 2014), few surveys (see this recent one by Broadbent and Schaffner, which however remains at a very high level), and a scientific literature that is not easy to navigate.

What?

So this is what Stephanie & myself set to do, share our enthusiasm for quantum cryptography with you, young enthusiasts! What will the course be about? If you care you should watch the promo video, sign up, and take the course!

We hope to use the ten weeks we have to take the absolute beginner in quantum information and cryptography to the level where she has a solid conceptual and mathematical understanding of quantum cryptography. A large chunk of the course will be devoted to the description and security analysis of protocols for quantum key distribution (QKD). This includes the thorny notions associated with measuring security with respect to quantum adversaries, and the recent paradigm of device independence. Beyond QKD, we also aim to give a broad overview of other feats of quantum cryptography, including primitives in two-party cryptography such as bit commitment or coin flipping, the noisy storage model, position-based cryptography, and delegated computation. Unfortunately we will not have enough time to cover quantum attacks on classical cryptosystems or post-quantum cryptography, leaving space for a companion “quantum cryptanalysis” course – volunteers?.

A word of caution: a solid background in linear algebra will be required for the course. Or at least, a will to put in the serious effort that will be required to follow the material. Making the course accessible does not mean dumbing it down, and the less mathematically inclined might find it challenging. The upshot, though, is that whomever sticks around will find it an intellectually rewarding experience, as the course will bring you to a stage where you’re basically ready to start doing research in the area. Not to scare everyone away: the course will start slow, with a “Week 0” of background material rolling out now, and the first couple weeks devoted to an introduction to the important notions of quantum information. My a priori assessment is that any 3rd or 4th year Caltech undergrad should have no problem taking the course. We’ll see how it plays out, but you should certainly try!

I will be teaching the course “inverted classroom” style at Caltech (as will Stephanie in Delft). The students will be asked to watch the videos, and more generally go through the online content, ahead of regular class meetings. In class, depending on the level of the students and their understanding of the material we will provide additional explanations or – as I hope will be possible – go further and develop our own projects extending the online material in directions of interest to the students.

This is a new experience for me, and I already stumbled through some of the beginners’ mistakes. But it’s fun! And, I hope, worth it. I’ll keep you updated. If anyone has experience (as I’m sure some of you do), unsolicited advice is more than welcome!

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flour + water + salt + time =

And there goes my last worry about the possibility of life in California…check! Would never have imagined it’d be so easy.

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