QSE Quantum Seminar: Dimensionality Reduction in the Presence of Quantum Models and Agents

Please join us for the QSE Center Quantum Seminar with Gu Mile from Nanyang Technological University, who will give the talk "Dimensionality Reduction in the Presence of Quantum Models and Agents" on Thursday May 15th.
Location: CM 1 5.

Pizzas will be available before the seminar at 12:30. All PhDs, postdocs, students, and PIs are welcome to join us.

TITLE: "Dimensionality Reduction in the Presence of Quantum Models and Agents"

ABSTRACT: 
Dimensionality reduction captures the spirit of Occam’s razor – asking the fundamental question: What features of current data are the essential indicators of future behaviour? By isolating such features and discarding the rest, we better understand underlying causal behaviour, while enabling models with reduced memory and energetic costs. Could quantum computers offer fundamental advantages in this arena? Here, I will survey our ongoing work along these directions in the context of stochastic modelling and quantum-enhanced adaptive agents. I will illustrate how machines armed with the capacity to process quantum information offer means to reduce dimensionality beyond what provably classical limits. Time permitting, I will discuss what the potential implications of these results are to (1) quantum thermodynamics, where they can tell us the fundamental costs of realising specific complex behaviour and (ii) quantum stochastic analysis, where they may significantly accelerate the timeline in which Quantum Monte Carlo methods can be practically realised.

BIO:
Gu is originally from New Zealand and obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Queensland. After a faculty position at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua University, he joined Nanyang Technological University in 2016. Presently, Gu is the deputy director of the Nanyang Quantum Hub and the designated NRF investigator, where he leads a $S3 million project on quantum-enhanced autonomous agents. Gu is also the Principal Investigator at the Singapore Centre for Quantum Technologies, the French-Singapore joint institute, Majulab.

References:
 

• Energetic advantages for quantum agents in online execution of complex strategies." arXiv:2503.19896 (2025).
• Dimension reduction in quantum sampling of stochastic processes. npj Quantum Information 11, 34 (2025)
• Implementing quantum dimensionality reduction for non-Markovian stochastic simulation, Nature Communications 14.1, 2624. (2024)
• Quantum Adaptive Agents with Efficient Long-Term Memories, Phys. Rev. X 12, 011007 (2022)
• Extreme Dimensionality Reduction with Quantum Modelling, Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 260501 (2020)