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 quantum algorithms for continuous optimization and scientific computing. Specifically, I advocate Hamiltonian-oriented quantum algorithm design, a new paradigm in quantum computation that emphasizes both provable quantum speedups and realistic hardware implementability. I am particularly interested in the following topics:

  1. Theoretical foundation and design of quantum algorithms,
  2. Resource-efficient deployment of quantum algorithms,
  3. Infrastructure (e.g., software toolchains, benchmark, etc.) for quantum applications.

news

May 20, 2025 Our paper “Quantum Optimization via Gradient-Based Hamiltonian Descent” has been posted on arXiv. Check it now!
May 14, 2025 I am invited to speak in a minisymposium on “Dynamical Systems for Machine Learning” in SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems (DS25), organized by Yuqing Wang, Boumediene Hamzi, and Molei Tao.
May 08, 2025 Our paper “Operator-Level Quantum Acceleration of Non-Logconcave Sampling” has been posted on arXiv. Check it now!

selected publications

  1. embedding.png
    Expanding hardware-efficiently manipulable Hilbert space via Hamiltonian embedding
    Jiaqi Leng ,  Joseph Li ,  Yuxiang Peng , and 1 more author
    Preprint (under review), 2024
  2. qhd.png
    Quantum Hamiltonian Descent
    Jiaqi Leng ,  Ethan Hickman ,  Joseph Li , and 1 more author
    Preprint, 2023