Daniel Liang

Daniel Liang

Postdoctoral Fellow

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice University under the supervision of Nai-Hui Chia. I earned a PhD in Computer Science at UT Austin while advised by Scott Aaronson. Prior to that, I received a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Cornell University in both Computer Science and Engineering Physics.

Research Interests

My focus is on the application of learning theory to quantum problems. That is, given some unknown quantum system, try and learn it, under varying definitions of the word “learn”. During my PhD, I focused on leveraging properties of the stabilizer formalism to tackle topics such as tomography, PAC/SQ/Agnostic learning, property testing, and pseudorandomness. I am additionally broadly interested in quantum information, quantum complexity theory, and theoretical computer science.

Publications [Author Order is Alphabetical unless specified by an asterisk (*)]

  1. Efficient Learning of Quantum States Prepared With Few Non-Clifford Gates II: Single-Copy Measurements

    Sabee Grewal, Vishnu Iyer, William Kretschmer, Daniel Liang
    [arXiv]

  2. Efficient Learning of Quantum States Prepared With Few Non-Clifford Gates

    Sabee Grewal, Vishnu Iyer, William Kretschmer, Daniel Liang
    [arXiv]

  3. Clifford Circuits can be Properly PAC Learned if and only if RP=NP

    Daniel Liang
    Quantum 7, 1036 – 2023
    [arXiv][Quantum]

  4. Improved Stabilizer Estimation via Bell Difference Sampling

    Sabee Grewal, Vishnu Iyer, William Kretschmer, Daniel Liang
    [arXiv]

  5. Low-Stabilizer-Complexity Quantum States Are Not Pseudorandom

    Sabee Grewal, Vishnu Iyer, William Kretschmer, Daniel Liang
    14th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2023)
    ITCS 2023 Best Student Paper Award
    [arXiv][ITCS 2023]

  6. On the Hardness of PAC-learning stabilizer States with Noise

    Aravind Gollakota, Daniel Liang
    Quantum 6, 640 – 2022
    [arXiv][Quantum]

  7. * Investigating quantum approximate optimization algorithms under bang-bang protocols

    Daniel Liang, Li Li, Stefan Leichenauer
    Physical Review Research 2 (3) – 2020
    [arXiv][PRR]

  8. * Simulation of qubit quantum circuits via Pauli propagation

    Patrick Rall, Daniel Liang, Jeremy Cook, William Kretschmer
    Physical Review A 99 (6) – 2019
    [arXiv][PRA]