Learning the Complexity of Weakly Noisy Quantum States

Quantifying the complexity of quantum states is a longstanding key problem in various subfields of science, ranging from quantum computing to the black-hole theory. The lower bound on quantum pure state complexity has been shown to grow linearly with system size [Haferkamp et al., 2022]. However, extending this result to noisy circuit environments, which better reflect real quantum devices, remains an open challenge. In this paper, we explore the complexity of weakly noisy quantum states via the quantum learning method. We present an efficient learning algorithm, that leverages the classical shadow representation of target quantum states, to predict the circuit complexity of weakly noisy quantum states. Our algorithm is proved to be optimal in terms of sample complexity accompanied with polynomial classical processing time. Our result builds a bridge between the learning algorithm and quantum state complexity, meanwhile highlighting the power of learning algorithm in characterizing intrinsic properties of quantum states.