Snehal Raj
Hi there! I am Snehal Raj, a CIFRE PhD Student at LIP6/CNRS - Sorbonne University and QC Ware, under Prof. Elham Kashefi (academic supervisor) & Dr. Brian Coyle (industry supervisor).
My thesis explores:
- Theoretical study of quantum & quantum-inspired algorithms
- Empirical validation of these algorithms
- Bridging quantum and classical machine learning
I graduated from the University of Oxford in 2022 with a Master’s in Advanced Computer Science. My thesis on improving simulations for Google’s supremacy circuits was supervised by Prof. Aleks Kissinger and is available here.
Before that, I was at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur where I majored in Computer Science and Engineering. I worked on Quantum Query Complexity as part of my bachelor’s thesis and was supervised by Prof. Rajat Mittal.
In a past life, I was affiliated with Adobe Research working on LLMs.
Research Interests
Quantum Computing
Variational quantum algorithms, quantum machine learning, and near-term quantum applications. Particularly interested in bridging the gap between theoretical quantum advantage and practical implementations on NISQ devices.
Reinforcement Learning
Exploring the intersection of quantum computing and reinforcement learning, including quantum policy optimization and quantum-enhanced exploration strategies.
Large Foundation Models
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning, quantum-inspired adapters for LLMs, and efficient training methods for large-scale models.
News
| Nov 7, 2025 | Our paper “Training-Efficient Density Quantum Machine Learning” published in npj Quantum Information! Read it here. |
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| Aug 15, 2025 | Our paper “Bayesian Quantum Orthogonal Neural Networks for Anomaly Detection” published at IEEE Quantum Week 2025! Read it here. |
| Nov 20, 2024 | Presented “Training-Efficient Density Quantum Machine Learning” at QTML 2024 in Melbourne! Watch the talk and read the paper. |
| Jun 1, 2024 | Started my CIFRE PhD at Sorbonne University / LIP6 and QC Ware, working on quantum & quantum-inspired machine learning! |
Selected Publications
2025
- npj QI
- arXivarXiv preprint arXiv:2502.06916, 2025
- arXivarXiv preprint arXiv:2504.18103, 2025
2023
- Quantum
2021
- EMNLPIn Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2021