Jiaqi (Jimmy) Leng

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I am a Simons Quantum Postdoctoral Fellow at Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley, hosted by Umesh Vazirani and Lin Lin. I got my Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 2024, where I was fortunate to be advised by Xiaodi Wu. My name in Chinese: 冷佳奇.

My research focuses on the interplay between machine learning and quantum computation. I design quantum algorithms inspired by core principles in modern ML, such as optimization, sampling, and differentiable programming. To make these algorithms practical, I build scalable and automated toolchains for their simulation and deployment on current and near-term quantum computers. Recently, I am also interested in quantum-inspired methods amenable to large-scale acceleration on today’s classical processors.

news

Sep 21, 2025 Our submission “Quantum-Inspired Hamiltonian Descent for Mixed-Integer Quadratic Programming” has been accepted by the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop ScaleOPT: GPU-Accelerated and Scalable Optimization as a poster.
Sep 03, 2025 My collaborators (Yuxiang Peng, Lei Fan, and Xiaodi Wu) and I organize a tutorial titled “Step-by-Step Guide to Solving Nonlinear Optimization with Quantum Computers” at the IEEE Quantum Week (QCE25). Check it out if you are attending!
Jul 24, 2025 I chair a session “Quantum Methods for Optimization and Sampling” at the International Conference on Continuous Optimization (ICCOPT 2025), in which I also give a talk on a new quantum algorithm for Gibbs sampling with continuous potentials.

selected publications

  1. gibbs_sampling.png
    Operator-Level Quantum Acceleration of Non-Logconcave Sampling
    Jiaqi Leng ,  Zhiyan Ding ,  Zherui Chen , and 1 more author
    Preprint, 2025
  2. embedding.png
    Expanding hardware-efficiently manipulable Hilbert space via Hamiltonian embedding
    Jiaqi Leng ,  Joseph Li ,  Yuxiang Peng , and 1 more author
    Quantum, 2025
  3. qhd.png
    Quantum Hamiltonian Descent
    Jiaqi Leng ,  Ethan Hickman ,  Joseph Li , and 1 more author
    Preprint, 2023