Multi-armed quantum bandits: Exploration versus exploitation when learning properties of quantum states

Josep Lumbreras1, Erkka Haapasalo1, and Marco Tomamichel1,2

1Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore, Singapore
2Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Abstract

We initiate the study of tradeoffs between exploration and exploitation in online learning of properties of quantum states. Given sequential oracle access to an unknown quantum state, in each round, we are tasked to choose an observable from a set of actions aiming to maximize its expectation value on the state (the reward). Information gained about the unknown state from previous rounds can be used to gradually improve the choice of action, thus reducing the gap between the reward and the maximal reward attainable with the given action set (the regret). We provide various information-theoretic lower bounds on the cumulative regret that an optimal learner must incur, and show that it scales at least as the square root of the number of rounds played. We also investigate the dependence of the cumulative regret on the number of available actions and the dimension of the underlying space. Moreover, we exhibit strategies that are optimal for bandits with a finite number of arms and general mixed states.

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Cited by

[1] Zongqi Wan, Zhijie Zhang, Tongyang Li, Jialin Zhang, and Xiaoming Sun, "Quantum Multi-Armed Bandits and Stochastic Linear Bandits Enjoy Logarithmic Regrets", arXiv:2205.14988.

[2] Xinyi Chen, Elad Hazan, Tongyang Li, Zhou Lu, Xinzhao Wang, and Rui Yang, "Adaptive Online Learning of Quantum States", arXiv:2206.00220.

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