Online learning of quantum states

Suppose we have many copies of an unknown n-qubit state . We measure some copies of using a known two-outcome measurement E₁, then other copies using a measurement E₂, and so on. At each stage t, we generate a current hypothesis !_t about the state , using the outcomes of the previous measurements. We show that it is possible to do this in a way that guarantees that |Tr(E_i!_t) Tr(E_i)|, the error in our prediction for the next measurement, is at least " at most On/"² times. Even in the “non-realizable” setting-where there could be arbitrary noise in the measurement outcomes-we show how to output hypothesis states that incur at most O(^pTn ) excess loss over the best possible state on the first T measurements. These results generalize a 2007 theorem by Aaronson on the PAC-learnability of quantum states, to the online and regret-minimization settings. We give three different ways to prove our results-using convex optimization, quantum postselection, and sequential fat-shattering dimension-which have different advantages in terms of parameters and portability.