Interactive quantum advantage with noisy, shallow Clifford circuits

Abstract

Recent work by Bravyi et al. constructs a relation problem that a noisy constant-depth quantum circuit (QNC${}^0$) can solve with near certainty (probability $1-o(1)$), but that any bounded fan-in constant-depth classical circuit (NC${}^0$) fails with some constant probability. We show that this robustness to noise can be achieved in the other low-depth quantum/classical circuit separations in this area. In particular, we show a general strategy for adding noise tolerance to the interactive protocols of Grier and Schaeffer. As a consequence, we obtain an unconditional separation between noisy QNC${}^0$ circuits and AC${}^0[p]$ circuits for all primes $p\ge 2$, and a conditional separation between noisy QNC${}^0$ circuits and log-space classical machines under a plausible complexity-theoretic conjecture. A key component of this reduction is showing average-case hardness for the classical simulation tasks -- that is, showing that a classical simulation of the quantum interactive task is still powerful even if it is allowed to err with constant probability over a uniformly random input. We show that is true even for quantum tasks which are $\oplus$L-hard to simulate. To do this, we borrow techniques from randomized encodings used in cryptography.

33 pages (minor edits)