VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Louis Golowich
dblp:209/3619
· DBLP profile ↗
13ranked-venue papers
12as first author
13since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-5169-0596ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Theory of computation · 13 · 12 first-author · 13 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Quantum LDPC Codes of Almost Linear Distance via Iterated Homological ProductsabstractThe first linear-distance quantum LDPC codes were recently constructed by a line of breakthrough works (culminating in the result of Panteleev & Kalachev, 2021). All such constructions, even when allowing for almost-linear distance, are based on an operation called a balanced (or lifted) product, which is used in a one-shot manner to combine a pair of large classical codes possessing a group symmetry. We present a new construction of almost-linear distance quantum LDPC codes that is iterative in nature. Our construction is based on a more basic and widely used product, namely the homological product (i.e. the tensor product of chain complexes). Specifically, for every ε > 0, we obtain a family of [[N,N^{1-ε},N^{1-ε}]] (subsystem) quantum LDPC codes via repeated homological products of a constant-sized quantum locally testable code. Our key idea is to remove certain low-weight codewords using subsystem codes (while still maintaining constant stabilizer weight), in order to circumvent a particular obstruction that limited the distance of many prior homological product code constructions to at most Õ(√N). Louis Golowich, Venkatesan Guruswami |
CCC | 1 |
| 2025 | Near-Asymptotically-Good Quantum Codes with Transversal CCZ Gates and Sublinear-Weight Parity-ChecksabstractIt is a major challenge to construct good quantum codes supporting fault-tolerant (e.g. transversal) non-Clifford gates with low-weight parity-check measurements. In this paper, we construct the first known quantum codes with linear dimension and distance supporting transversal non-Clifford gates that have sublinear locality (i.e. parity-check weight). Specifically, we construct codes with transversal CCZ gates that have dimension and distance growing linearly in the block length, and have locality growing as the square root of the block length. We furthermore design an efficient decoding algorithm for these codes. The alphabet size of these codes grows as the square root of the block length, but it can be reduced to a constant (e.g. binary) while incurring a polylogarithmic loss in other parameters. We also show how to decrease the locality to the cube root of the block length, albeit with a larger alphabet size and slightly lower distance.We construct these codes as products of classical codes with appropriate algebraic structure. While our quantum codes are subsystem codes with non-commuting gauge operators, we show they nevertheless permit error correction from noisy syndrome measurements.As byproducts, we prove multiple technical results of independent interest. In particular, our efficient decoder can be viewed as a new multivariate generalization of Prony’s method for reconstructing a function from partial access to its Fourier transform. Meanwhile, our distance analysis involves new connections to the classical study of maximally recoverable codes. Our results on product codes also resolve a conjecture of Bravyi & Hastings (2014) in the large-alphabet regime, by providing a new construction of quantum codes with linear dimension and distance and small polynomial locality. Louis Golowich, Venkatesan Guruswami |
FOCS | 1 |
| 2025 | Quantum Locally Recoverable CodesabstractClassical locally recoverable codes, which permit highly efficient recovery from localized errors as well as global recovery from larger errors, provide some of the most useful codes for distributed data storage in practice. In this paper, we initiate the study of quantum locally recoverable codes (qLRCs). In the long term, like their classical counterparts, such qLRCs may be used for large-scale quantum data storage. Furthermore, our results have concrete implications for quantum LDPC codes, which are widely applicable to near-term quantum error-correction, as local recoverability is a weakening of the LDPC property. Louis Golowich, Venkatesan Guruswami |
SODA | 1 |
| 2025 | Asymptotically Good Quantum Codes with Transversal Non-Clifford Gates
Louis Golowich, Venkatesan Guruswami |
STOC | 1 |
| 2025 | Quantum LDPC Codes with Transversal Non-Clifford Gates via Products of Algebraic Codes
Louis Golowich, Ting-Chun Lin |
STOC | 1 |
| 2024 | Decoding Quasi-Cyclic Quantum LDPC CodesabstractQuantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes are an important component in the quest for quantum fault tolerance. Dramatic recent progress on qLDPC codes has led to constructions which are asymptotically good, and which admit linear-time decoders to correct errors affecting a constant fraction of codeword qubits. These constructions, while theoretically explicit, rely on inner codes with strong properties only shown to exist by probabilistic arguments, resulting in lengths that are too large to be practically relevant. In practice, the surface/toric codes, which are the product of two repetition codes, are still often the qLDPC codes of choice. A previous construction of qLDPC codes based on the lifted product of an expander-based classical LDPC code with a repetition code (Panteleev and Kalachev, 2020) achieved a near-linear distance, and avoids the need for such intractable inner codes. Our main result is an efficient decoding algorithm for these codes that corrects a near-linear number of adversarial errors. En route, we give a similar algorithm for the hypergraph product version these codes, which are simpler but have distance growing only as the square root of the block length. Our decoding algorithms leverage the fact that the codes we consider are quasi-cyclic, meaning that they respect a cyclic group symmetry. Since the repetition code is not based on expanders, previous approaches to decoding expander-based qLDPC codes, which typically worked by greedily flipping code bits to reduce some potential function, do not apply in our setting. Instead, we reduce our decoding problem (in a black-box manner) to that of decoding classical expander-based LDPC codes under noisy parity-check syndromes. For completeness, we also include a treatment of such classical noisy-syndrome decoding that is sufficient for our application to the quantum setting. Louis Golowich, Venkatesan Guruswami |
FOCS | 1 |
| 2024 | NLTS Hamiltonians and Strongly-Explicit SoS Lower Bounds from Low-Rate Quantum LDPC CodesabstractRecent constructions of the first asymptotically good quantum LDPC (qLDPC) codes led to two breakthroughs in complexity theory: the NLTS (No Low-Energy Trivial States) theorem (Anshu, Breuckmann, and Nirkhe, STOC'23), and explicit lower bounds against a linear number of levels of the Sum-of-Squares (SoS) hierarchy (Hopkins and Lin, FOCS'22). In this work, we obtain improvements to both of these results using qLDPC codes of low rate: - Whereas Anshu et al. only obtained NLTS Hamiltonians from qLDPC codes of linear dimension, we show the stronger result that qLDPC codes of arbitrarily small positive dimension yield NLTS Hamiltonians. - The SoS lower bounds of Hopkins and Lin are only weakly explicit because they require running Gaussian elimination to find a nontrivial codeword, which takes polynomial time. We resolve this shortcoming by introducing a new method of planting a strongly explicit nontrivial codeword in linear-distance qLDPC codes, which in turn yields strongly explicit SoS lower bounds. Our "planted" qLDPC codes may be of independent interest, as they provide a new way of ensuring a qLDPC code has positive dimension without resorting to parity check counting, and therefore provide more flexibility in the code construction. Louis Golowich, Tali Kaufman |
ITCS | 1 |
| 2024 | New Explicit Constant-Degree Lossless ExpandersabstractWe present a new explicit construction of onesided bipartite lossless expanders of constant degree, with arbitrary constant ratio between the sizes of the two vertex sets. Our construction is simpler to state and analyze than the only prior construction of Capalbo, Reingold, Vadhan, and Wigderson (2002), and achieves improved parameters. Louis Golowich |
SODA | 1 |
| 2024 | Approaching the Quantum Singleton Bound with Approximate Error CorrectionabstractIt is well known that no quantum error correcting code of rate R can correct adversarial errors on more than a (1−R)/4 fraction of symbols. But what if we only require our codes to approximately recover the message? Thiago Bergamaschi, Louis Golowich, Sam Gunn |
STOC | 2 |
| 2023 | From Grassmannian to Simplicial High-Dimensional ExpandersabstractIn this paper, we present a new construction of simplicial complexes of subpolynomial degree with arbitrarily good local spectral expansion. Previously, the only known high-dimensional expanders (HDXs) with arbitrarily good expansion and less than polynomial degree were based on one of two constructions, namely Ramanujan complexes and coset complexes. In contrast, our construction is a Cayley complex over an abelian group, with Cayley generating set given by a Grassmannian HDX.Our construction is in part motivated by a coding-theoretic interpretation of Grassmannian HDXs that we present, which provides a formal connection between Grassmannian HDXs, simplicial HDXs, and LDPC codes. We apply this interpretation to prove a general characterization of the 1-homology groups of our Cayley simplicial complexes. Using this result, we construct simplicial complexes on N vertices with arbitrarily good local expansion for which the dimension of the 1-homology group grows as the squared logarithm of N. No prior constructions in the literature have been shown to achieve as large a 1-homology group. Louis Golowich |
FOCS | 1 |
| 2023 | A New Berry-Esseen Theorem for Expander WalksabstractWe prove that the sum of t boolean-valued random variables sampled by a random walk on a regular expander converges in total variation distance to a discrete normal distribution at a rate of O(λ/t1/2−o(1)), where λ is the second largest eigenvalue of the random walk matrix in absolute value. To the best of our knowledge, among known Berry-Esseen bounds for Markov chains, our result is the first to show convergence in total variation distance, and is also the first to incorporate a linear dependence on expansion λ. In contrast, prior Markov chain Berry-Esseen bounds showed a convergence rate of O(1/√t) in weaker metrics such as Kolmogorov distance. Louis Golowich |
STOC | 1 |
| 2022 | Pseudorandomness of Expander Random Walks for Symmetric Functions and Permutation Branching Programs
Louis Golowich, Salil P. Vadhan |
CCC | 1 |
| 2021 | Improved Product-Based High-Dimensional ExpandersabstractHigh-dimensional expanders generalize the notion of expander graphs to higher-dimensional simplicial complexes. In contrast to expander graphs, only a handful of high-dimensional expander constructions have been proposed, and no elementary combinatorial construction with near-optimal expansion is known. In this paper, we introduce an improved combinatorial high-dimensional expander construction, by modifying a previous construction of Liu, Mohanty, and Yang (ITCS 2020), which is based on a high-dimensional variant of a tensor product. Our construction achieves a spectral gap of $Ω(\frac{1}{k^2})$ for random walks on the $k$-dimensional faces, which is only quadratically worse than the optimal bound of $Θ(\frac{1}{k})$. Previous combinatorial constructions, including that of Liu, Mohanty, and Yang, only achieved a spectral gap that is exponentially small in $k$. We also present reasoning that suggests our construction is optimal among similar product-based constructions. Louis Golowich |
APPROX-RANDOM | 1 |