Unconditional Quantum Advantage for Sampling with Shallow Circuits

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that constant-depth quantum circuits can efficiently sample from certain distributions that classical circuits with bounded fan-in cannot replicate, establishing an unconditional quantum advantage in sampling tasks.

Contribution

The authors construct a specific distribution and prove that quantum circuits can sample from it efficiently while classical circuits require logarithmic depth, providing an unconditional separation.

Findings

Quantum circuits sample from distribution close to D_n efficiently.

Classical bounded fan-in circuits need logarithmic depth to approximate D_n.

Unconditional proof of quantum advantage in sampling tasks.

Abstract

Recent work by Bravyi, Gosset, and Koenig showed that there exists a search problem that a constant-depth quantum circuit can solve, but that any constant-depth classical circuit with bounded fan-in cannot. They also pose the question: Can we achieve a similar proof of separation for an input-independent sampling task? In this paper, we show that the answer to this question is yes when the number of random input bits given to the classical circuit is bounded. We introduce a distribution $D_{n}$ over $\{0,1\}^n$ and construct a constant-depth uniform quantum circuit family $\{C_n\}_n$ such that $C_n$ samples from a distribution close to $D_{n}$ in total variation distance. For any $\delta < 1$ we also prove, unconditionally, that any classical circuit with bounded fan-in gates that takes as input $kn + n^\delta$ i.i.d. Bernouli random variables with entropy $1/k$ and produces output close to $D_{n}$ in total variation distance has depth $\Omega(\log \log n)$. This gives an unconditional proof that constant-depth quantum circuits can sample from distributions that can't be reproduced by constant-depth bounded fan-in classical circuits, even up to additive error. We also show a similar separation between constant-depth quantum circuits with advice and classical circuits with bounded fan-in and fan-out, but access to an unbounded number of i.i.d random inputs. The distribution $D_n$ and classical circuit lower bounds are inspired by work of Viola, in which he shows a different (but related) distribution cannot be sampled from approximately by constant-depth bounded fan-in classical circuits.