Tyrol
Minimizing classical resources in variational measurement-based quantum computation for generative modeling
Majumder, Arunava, Nautrup, Hendrik Poulsen, Briegel, Hans J.
Measurement-based quantum computation (MBQC) is a framework for quantum information processing in which a computational task is carried out through one-qubit measurements on a highly entangled resource state. Due to the indeterminacy of the outcomes of a quantum measurement, the random outcomes of these operations, if not corrected, yield a variational quantum channel family. Traditionally, this randomness is corrected through classical processing in order to ensure deterministic unitary computations. Recently, variational measurement-based quantum computation (VMBQC) has been introduced to exploit this measurement-induced randomness to gain an advantage in generative modeling. A limitation of this approach is that the corresponding channel model has twice as many parameters compared to the unitary model, scaling as $N \times D$, where $N$ is the number of logical qubits (width) and $D$ is the depth of the VMBQC model. This can often make optimization more difficult and may lead to poorly trainable models. In this paper, we present a restricted VMBQC model that extends the unitary setting to a channel-based one using only a single additional trainable parameter. We show, both numerically and algebraically, that this minimal extension is sufficient to generate probability distributions that cannot be learned by the corresponding unitary model.
A Job I Like or a Job I Can Get: Designing Job Recommender Systems Using Field Experiments
Bied, Guillaume, Caillou, Philippe, Crépon, Bruno, Gaillac, Christophe, Pérennes, Elia, Sebag, Michèle
Recommendation systems (RSs) are increasingly used to guide job seekers on online platforms, yet the algorithms currently deployed are typically optimized for predictive objectives such as clicks, applications, or hires, rather than job seekers' welfare. We develop a job-search model with an application stage in which the value of a vacancy depends on two dimensions: the utility it delivers to the worker and the probability that an application succeeds. The model implies that welfare-optimal RSs rank vacancies by an expected-surplus index combining both, and shows why rankings based solely on utility, hiring probabilities, or observed application behavior are generically suboptimal, an instance of the inversion problem between behavior and welfare. We test these predictions and quantify their practical importance through two randomized field experiments conducted with the French public employment service. The first experiment, comparing existing algorithms and their combinations, provides behavioral evidence that both dimensions shape application decisions. Guided by the model and these results, the second experiment extends the comparison to an RS designed to approximate the welfare-optimal ranking. The experiments generate exogenous variation in the vacancies shown to job seekers, allowing us to estimate the model, validate its behavioral predictions, and construct a welfare metric. Algorithms informed by the model-implied optimal ranking substantially outperform existing approaches and perform close to the welfare-optimal benchmark. Our results show that embedding predictive tools within a simple job-search framework and combining it with experimental evidence yields recommendation rules with substantial welfare gains in practice.
Causes and Effects of Unanticipated Numerical Deviations in Neural Network Inference Frameworks
Hardware-specific optimizations in machine learning (ML) frameworks can cause numerical deviations of inference results. Quite surprisingly, despite using a fixed trained model and fixed input data, inference results are not consistent across platforms, and sometimes not even deterministic on the same platform. We study the causes of these numerical deviations for convolutional neural networks (CNN) on realistic end-to-end inference pipelines and in isolated experiments. Results from 75 distinct platforms suggest that the main causes of deviations on CPUs are differences in SIMD use, and the selection of convolution algorithms at runtime on GPUs. We link the causes and propagation effects to properties of the ML model and evaluate potential mitigations. We make our research code publicly available.
SoftMatcha 2: A Fast and Soft Pattern Matcher for Trillion-Scale Corpora
Yoneda, Masataka, Matsushita, Yusuke, Kamoda, Go, Suenaga, Kohei, Akiba, Takuya, Waga, Masaki, Yokoi, Sho
We present an ultra-fast and flexible search algorithm that enables search over trillion-scale natural language corpora in under 0.3 seconds while handling semantic variations (substitution, insertion, and deletion). Our approach employs string matching based on suffix arrays that scales well with corpus size. To mitigate the combinatorial explosion induced by the semantic relaxation of queries, our method is built on two key algorithmic ideas: fast exact lookup enabled by a disk-aware design, and dynamic corpus-aware pruning. We theoretically show that the proposed method suppresses exponential growth in the search space with respect to query length by leveraging statistical properties of natural language. In experiments on FineWeb-Edu (Lozhkov et al., 2024) (1.4T tokens), we show that our method achieves significantly lower search latency than existing methods: infini-gram (Liu et al., 2024), infini-gram mini (Xu et al., 2025), and SoftMatcha (Deguchi et al., 2025). As a practical application, we demonstrate that our method identifies benchmark contamination in training corpora, unidentified by existing approaches. We also provide an online demo of fast, soft search across corpora in seven languages.