The paper [1] states: > There is a classical algorithm whose output distribution is O(ε)-close in total variation distance to the distribution given by l2-norm sampling from the ith row of a low- rank approximation D of A in query and time complexity [O(poly-func)] where δ is the probability of failure. So the classical algorithm would give a "sufficiently close" approximation of what the QML would output? The article doesn't mention this at all. Is it fair to compare a quantum algorithm with an equivalent classical approximation algorithm? From the quanta magazine article: > Computer scientists had considered [the recommendation problem] to be one of the best examples of a problem that’s exponentially faster to solve on quantum computers — making it an important validation of the power of these futuristic machines. Now Tang has stripped that validation away. Has he really? [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.04271.pdf
A quantum-inspired classical algorithm for recommendation systems
Ewin Tang
2018 · arXiv
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From the abstract
We give a classical analogue to Kerenidis and Prakash's quantum recommendation system, previously believed to be one of the strongest candidates for provably exponential speedups in quantum machine learning. Our main result is an algorithm that, given an $m \times n$ matrix in a data structure supporting certain $\ell^2$-norm sampling operations, outputs an $\ell^2$-norm sample from a rank-$k$ approximation of that matrix in time $O(\text{poly}(k)\log(mn))$, only polynomially slower than the quantum algorithm. As a consequence, Kerenidis and Prakash's algorithm does not in fact give an exponential speedup over classical algorithms. Further, under strong input assumptions, the classical recommendation system resulting from our algorithm produces recommendations exponentially faster than previous classical systems, which run in time linear in $m$ and $n$. The main insight of this work is the use of simple routines to manipulate $\ell^2$-norm sampling distributions, which play the role of quantum superpositions in the classical setting. This correspondence indicates a potentially fruitful framework for formally comparing quantum machine learning algorithms to classical machine learning algorithms.
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From the article > So far there has been a lot of excitement but also a lot of crushed dreams and backtracking, when solutions giving a quantum boost were later again beaten by classical computers, e.g. Ewin Tang showed this in some cases last summer (check his paper or story in Quanta). Minor: Ewin is a woman. The paper referred to is at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.04271.pdf
I'd like to take the opportunity to clear a misunderstanding that I've seen in several threads related to quantum computing. ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— The classes of complexity of interest here are P, NP, BPP, and BQP. — P corresponds to the problems that can be solved by a classical computer (deterministic Turing machine) in polynomial time. For example finding a shortest path between nodes in a graph is in this complexity class. — NP corresponds to the problems where “verifying a solution” is in P. In other words, it's “easy” to check if a solution is actually valid. We know that P ⊆ NP which means that when it's easy to find a solution,…
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it's also easy to check that a solution is valid (but we don't know if the opposite is true). This class contains interesting problems such as prime factorization on which all the current Web's security depends. It's easy to check if a factorization is valid, but it's hypothesized that it's hard to actually find it. Now the interesting part is that we're not sure it's actually true, so the security house of cards might actually tumble at some point (if it hasn't already secretly). — BPP contains all the problems that you can solve in polynomial time (so like P) but with a chance of less than 1/3 of being incorrect! In practice, we run the algorithm several times to reduce the probability of being wrong to less than 2^(−ck) (c is a positive constant, k is the number of times it's run). — BQP is probably the most interesting class here. It's just like BPP but on a quantum computer. Now the interesting part is that we don't know (yet) an efficient way of finding the prime factorization on a classical computer. But on a quantum computer, we have the infamous Shor's algorithm which can solve this problem in polynomial time with a bounded error! ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— The current knowledge about complexity classes is that P ⊆ BPP ⊆ BQP. We don't know how NP and BQP relate to each other. What does this mean? We don't know if quantum computers can solve harder problems theoretically. But they seem to do sometimes in practice to the best of our knowledge. Coming back to the Shor's algorithm example, we don't know any classical algorithm that can solve the prime factorization problem as efficiently. But this doesn't mean that such an algorithm doesn't exist! Now you might think that all of this is only theoretical considerations that only mathematicians care about. After all, we don't care if theoretically there might exist efficient classical algorithms for supposedly hard problems if we don't find them anyway right? This is a valid observation. If big enough quantum computers become a reality one day, we'll be able to solve some hard problems right away. However in the meantime, we might totally find efficient classical algorithms making quantum computers less useful. Actually, it has already happened last year[1]! A recommendation problem that we thought was intractable by classical means (but easy to solve with quantum computers) turned out to be solvable more easily than expected by a classical computer. This classical algorithm draws inspiration from quantum algorithms however. So if anything, quantum computing will force us to look at problems from another perspective and solve them in novel ways. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.04271
Looking at the paper, I think the fact that this is a recommendation algorithm is fairly important. The big thing is that broadly "the recommendation algorithm" is not some single problem in combinatorics. Rather, it a initially ill-posed problem that yields concrete problems based on simplifying assumptions. IE, sure, the FINAL, SOLVED problem is as Aaronson put it but because different researchers make different simplifying assumptions, that final problem actually hadn't studied that much - half the achievement of the paper is finding simplifying assumptions that are real world-plausible and yield tractable problems ("Obviously, without any restrictions on what T looks…
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like, this problem is ill-posed. We make this problem tractable through the standard assumption that T is close to a matrix of small rank k (constant or logarithmic in m and n). This reflects the intuition that users tend to fall into a small number of classes based on their preferences. With this assumption, it becomes possible to infer information from subsampled data. We can determine the classes a user lies in, and use information about those classes to give a likely-to-be-good recommendation") The original quantum recommendation algorithm paper involved both a simplifying assumption about the sorts of consumers one was models and a system of sampling to get a good approximation ("The literature on theoretical recommendation systems is fairly scant, because such algorithms quickly run up against the limits of their model, despite them being somewhat far from the results seen in practice.") https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.04271.pdf
It's worth noting that the title of the paper does emphasize this: A quantum-inspired classical algorithm for recommendation systems. The abstract does too: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.04271
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