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Documents authored by Wang, Yipu


Document
Complexity Classification of Product State Problems for Local Hamiltonians

Authors: John Kallaugher, Ojas Parekh, Kevin Thompson, Yipu Wang, and Justin Yirka

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 325, 16th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2025)


Abstract
Product states, unentangled tensor products of single qubits, are a ubiquitous ansatz in quantum computation, including for state-of-the-art Hamiltonian approximation algorithms. A natural question is whether we should expect to efficiently solve product state problems on any interesting families of Hamiltonians. We completely classify the complexity of finding minimum-energy product states for Hamiltonians defined by any fixed set of allowed 2-qubit interactions. Our results follow a line of work classifying the complexity of solving Hamiltonian problems and classical constraint satisfaction problems based on the allowed constraints. We prove that estimating the minimum energy of a product state is in 𝖯 if and only if all allowed interactions are 1-local, and NP-complete otherwise. Equivalently, any family of non-trivial two-body interactions generates Hamiltonians with NP-complete product-state problems. Our hardness constructions only require coupling strengths of constant magnitude. A crucial component of our proofs is a collection of hardness results for a new variant of the Vector Max-Cut problem, which should be of independent interest. Our definition involves sums of distances rather than squared distances and allows linear stretches. We similarly give a proof that the original Vector Max-Cut problem is NP-complete in 3 dimensions. This implies hardness of optimizing product states for Quantum Max-Cut (the quantum Heisenberg model) is NP-complete, even when every term is guaranteed to have positive unit weight.

Cite as

John Kallaugher, Ojas Parekh, Kevin Thompson, Yipu Wang, and Justin Yirka. Complexity Classification of Product State Problems for Local Hamiltonians. In 16th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 325, pp. 63:1-63:32, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)


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@InProceedings{kallaugher_et_al:LIPIcs.ITCS.2025.63,
  author =	{Kallaugher, John and Parekh, Ojas and Thompson, Kevin and Wang, Yipu and Yirka, Justin},
  title =	{{Complexity Classification of Product State Problems for Local Hamiltonians}},
  booktitle =	{16th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2025)},
  pages =	{63:1--63:32},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-361-4},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{325},
  editor =	{Meka, Raghu},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2025.63},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-226910},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2025.63},
  annote =	{Keywords: quantum complexity, quantum algorithms, local hamiltonians}
}
Document
Topologically Trivial Closed Walks in Directed Surface Graphs

Authors: Jeff Erickson and Yipu Wang

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 129, 35th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2019)


Abstract
Let G be a directed graph with n vertices and m edges, embedded on a surface S, possibly with boundary, with first Betti number beta. We consider the complexity of finding closed directed walks in G that are either contractible (trivial in homotopy) or bounding (trivial in integer homology) in S. Specifically, we describe algorithms to determine whether G contains a simple contractible cycle in O(n+m) time, or a contractible closed walk in O(n+m) time, or a bounding closed walk in O(beta (n+m)) time. Our algorithms rely on subtle relationships between strong connectivity in G and in the dual graph G^*; our contractible-closed-walk algorithm also relies on a seminal topological result of Hass and Scott. We also prove that detecting simple bounding cycles is NP-hard. We also describe three polynomial-time algorithms to compute shortest contractible closed walks, depending on whether the fundamental group of the surface is free, abelian, or hyperbolic. A key step in our algorithm for hyperbolic surfaces is the construction of a context-free grammar with O(g^2L^2) non-terminals that generates all contractible closed walks of length at most L, and only contractible closed walks, in a system of quads of genus g >= 2. Finally, we show that computing shortest simple contractible cycles, shortest simple bounding cycles, and shortest bounding closed walks are all NP-hard.

Cite as

Jeff Erickson and Yipu Wang. Topologically Trivial Closed Walks in Directed Surface Graphs. In 35th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2019). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 129, pp. 34:1-34:17, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2019)


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@InProceedings{erickson_et_al:LIPIcs.SoCG.2019.34,
  author =	{Erickson, Jeff and Wang, Yipu},
  title =	{{Topologically Trivial Closed Walks in Directed Surface Graphs}},
  booktitle =	{35th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2019)},
  pages =	{34:1--34:17},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-104-7},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2019},
  volume =	{129},
  editor =	{Barequet, Gill and Wang, Yusu},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2019.34},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-104383},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2019.34},
  annote =	{Keywords: computational topology, surface-embedded graphs, homotopy, homology, strong connectivity, hyperbolic geometry, medial axes, context-free grammars}
}
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