Modern large language models - transformers and diffusion language models - are built around two canonical algorithmic tasks: prediction and generation. We prove unconditional separations between low-depth quantum computation and the corresponding bounded-resource classical language-model architectures in both regimes.
arXiv:2608. 05110v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Near-term quantum hardware limits circuit depth and often imposes geometrically local connectivity for quantum generative models, restricting the output distributions accessible to shallow unitary Born models.
By Arunava Majumder, Marius Krumm, Hendrik Poulsen Nautrup, Hans J. Briegel
arXiv:2608. 11066v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We prove inference-time quantum coordination advantages for specified AI state-tracking tasks.
By Ming Yang
arXiv:2606. 11673v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard dot-product self-attention computes, in a single layer, only pairwise (order-2) interactions between tokens; representing a generic order-$k$ interaction is known to require either super-quadratic resources in one layer or composition across depth.
By Jian Xu, Chao Li, Delu Zeng, John Paisley, Qibin Zhao
arXiv:2606. 19697v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The increasing popularity of \emph{reasoning} models -- language models that output a series of reasoning or thought tokens before producing an answer -- is justified, in part, by theoretical results showing that chain-of-thought (CoT) transformers can simulate Turing machines, and thus perform arbitrary computation.
By Yanhong Li, Anej Svete, Ashish Sabharwal, William Merrill
arXiv:2607. 24686v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Variational quantum circuits have been central to many proposed near-term applications of quantum computing, but a growing body of evidence suggests that trainability and quantum advantage are fundamentally at odds: ans\"atze expressive enough to resist efficient classical simulation tend to exhibit barren plateaus, while structures that provably rule out barren plateaus typically render them classically simulable.
By Nikhil Khatri, Stefan Zohren, Gabriel Matos