Classical Hardness of Learning Functions of Hamiltonians

Given that quantum computers are naturally suited to simulate the behavior of quantum many-body systems, an immediate question arises: can one formulate physically motivated quantum machine learning (QML) tasks that exhibit learning separations? We address this problem by studying the learnability of quantum many-body dynamics from the perspective of probably approximately correct (PAC)-learning. Concretely, we devise a supervised learning problem where the training set consists of specifications of randomized stabilizer probe states, evolution times sampled uniformly from a polynomially large time interval $[0,T]$, coupled with expectation values of certain observables evaluated on the resulting time-evolved state under an unknown Hamiltonian. For this learning task, we provide an efficient quantum procedure whose training phase learns the underlying Hamiltonian from short-time training samples, and whose deployment phase combines Hamiltonian simulation with the classical shadows protocol to perform inference on a newly given data point. By contrast, the existence of $O(\mathsf{poly}(n))$-time instances ensures classical hardness: by embedding a $\mathsf{BQP}$-complete computation into the polynomially long time-dynamics of a low-intersection variant of the Feynman-Kitaev clock Hamiltonian construction, we show that, for a certain family of input distributions, no randomized classical polynomial-time algorithm can fulfill our learning condition, unless $\mathsf{BQP}\subseteq\mathsf{P/poly}$. Furthermore, we show that the classically hard instance maintains quantum learnability. We also give an interpretation of our results in learning-assisted certified quantum simulation. Taken together, our results demonstrate a rigorous learning separation for a natural ML task based on Hamiltonian evolution, while building connections between quantum learning theory, quantum simulation, and QML.

Quantum-inspired classical algorithms have dequantized several quantum machine learning routines by replacing quantum linear-algebra subroutines with classical counterparts. However, the sampler based on quantum singular value transformation (QSVT) for learning with optimized random features is not covered by existing dequantization frameworks, because the matrix to be inverted is not itself available through sampling access. In this work, we develop a classical algorithm to address this type of quantum-advantage candidate. Our method samples heavy indices, reduces the transformation to a small principal block, and outputs a sparse classical representation with operator-norm guarantees. Applying this method dequantizes the sampler for optimized random features, giving a classical sampler with prescribed accuracy and polynomially related runtime. These results show that the factorization underlying a quantum block encoding can itself provide sufficient classical structure even when sampling-and-query access to the composite matrix is unavailable.

Consider two PAC learning algorithms, both having access to quantum computation, but differing in the types of examples they obtain: one is provided with classical samples, while the other is given quantum samples. Are there any learning tasks that can be efficiently performed by the latter, but not by the former? This question, the focus of our work, is surprisingly still open. Our main result is to show that \emph{relative to an oracle}, there are distributions that can be efficiently generated by a quantum learner with access to quantum samples, but not by a quantum learner with access to only classical samples, making progress to answering this question in the affirmative.