Excited to officially start as Assistant Professor at the beautiful campus of @UCLA today! If you are interested in a postdoc position in the theory of quantum computing, check out this position and apply by December 1:

Perk # 15 of @UCLA : you get to hear Terry Tao’s inspirational and informative public lecture on “Machine Assisted Mathematics”

RT @qhrant: 🎉 Big news! BlueQubit has closed a $10M Seed round led by Nyca Partners, with support from Chaac Ventures, Restive Ventures, &….

RT @sunjiao123sun_: Mitigating racial bias from LLMs is a lot easier than removing it from humans! . Can’t believe this happened at the bes….

Congratulations to my co-authors on finishing this nice work proposing HamQAOA, a quantum algo to optimize quantum Hamiltonians with provable guarantees! Ishaan did most of the writing here while juggling a full-time job and grad school applications. Expect great things from him!.

Just landed in the beautiful Vancouver to attend #NeurIPS for the first time! Here to present my work on a quantum algorithm for learning tensor data with Joao Basso and @Song__Mei. Come say hi at our Spotlight poster Wednesday 11a-2p!

We believe that studying optimization problems with symmetries enables better understanding of the unique behaviors of quantum algorithms and opens up new possibilities of superpolynomial quantum speedups! 🚀. (6/6).

While symmetry might appear important for the QAOA to succeed, we show the success probability remains high even when the symmetry is broken by randomly sampling the clauses. For example, we can take a symmetric Max-5-SAT problem with n^5 clauses and keep only n^2 clauses. (5/6).

we show 1-query QAOA with random parameters have 1/sqrt(n) success probability! This can be further improved to Ω(1) for specific problems. On the other hand, a lower bound of n/log(n) classical queries is required even when the symmetry is known in advance. (4/6).

We also give various techniques to analyze QAOA success probability on symmetric optimization problems. For example, when the cost function is purely a function of the Hamming distance to the solution and takes on mostly distinct values, (3/6).

We consider Max-SAT problems that exhibit (approximate) symmetry and contain planted solutions. We *rigorously* prove that 1-step QAOA can solve them in polynomial time, while the best competition-winning classical Max-SAT solvers appear to take exponential time. (2/6).

Can low-depth QAOA provide exponential quantum speedup over the best known classical heuristics on any optimization problems?. Yes! ✅ @quantumashley and I show this in our new paper:.which we did while I was a visiting fellow @PhasecraftLtd! (1/6).

My friends at @BlueQubitIO are hiring! If you’re passionate about useful applications of (near-future) quantum computers and thrive in a dynamic start-up environment, I highly recommend applying. It’s a lot of fun working with these guys!.

Excited to share that this week, I’m wrapping up my time @Caltech and joining @PhasecraftLtd to research quantum optimization! I will be in the UK for the summer before starting as an Assistant Professor @ECE_UCLA this fall! Looking forward to new challenges and collaborations 🚀.

RT @QuantaMagazine: A team of physicists has found a problem that only quantum computers can perform. Though still theoretical, this “quant….

RT @Song__Mei: Spiked tensor model has a huge stat/comp gap classically. What happens to quantum algorithms? We show QAOA has the same comp….

The original Yang-Baxter equation written down by C.N. Yang himself in YITP at Stony Brook! It is now encased in glass 😆

RT @RobertHuangHY: ☃️Is it easy to find local minima?☃️. When a physical system is cooled❄️, Nature doesn't always find the ground state bu….

RT @QuantumYakar: Operating a quantum computer, depicted by various artists using #dalle2. 🧵. Let's start with Francisco Goya. 1/21 https:….

#TQC2022 was a blast! I met a lot of cool people and had many great conversations. Grateful to @TQC_conference for giving the Outstanding Paper Prize to my work with Joao, Eddie, @kmarwahaha, and Ben!