Bo Yang

Quantum state purification is the functionality that, given multiple copies of an unknown state, outputs a state with increased purity. This is an essential building block for the near- and middle-term quantum ecosystems before the availability of full fault tolerance, where one may want to obtain purified quantum states instead of expectation values. We propose an effective state purification gadget with a moderate quantum overhead by projecting multiple noisy quantum inputs to their symmetry subspace defined by a set of projectors forming a subgroup of the symmetry group. This provides a state purification performance scaling inverse-linearly to the number of state copies given a fixed stochastic error rate, which drastically improves the implementation overhead in previous works. Our method may find its application in designing robust verification protocols for quantum outputs before the availability of fully fault-tolerant computing.

Cryptographic verification is essential for establishing trust in quantum-computing-as-a-service. However, a fundamental gap exists in the current verification landscape: existing efficient protocols are largely restricted to decision problems where correctness is boosted by classical majority voting. This excludes observable estimation, the statistical task underpinning nearly all near-term quantum advantage applications. For such tasks, current verification techniques face a prohibitive trade-off: either weak security guarantees or massive space overhead that exceeds the capacity of near-term hardware. To resolve this, we introduce the Secure Delegated Observable Estimation (SDOE) ideal resource, the first formal cryptographic framework for trustworthy expectation-value estimation within Abstract Cryptography. We then present the Verifiable Blind Observable Estimation (VBOE) protocol, which efficiently constructs this resource. VBOE circumvents the limitations inherent in prior methodologies by enabling the sequential collection of samples with negligible security error, requiring zero extra qubit overhead. By directly averaging computation rounds in classical post-processing, our protocol provides the only known path to rigorous, composable verification for the most common class of near-term quantum-classical hybrid algorithms. This work bridges foundational cryptographic theory with practical quantum tasks, enabling the certification of quantum utility on current and near-future devices.