Snehal Raj

QC Ware | LIP6 | Sorbonne Universite

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.
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

  1. npj QI
    Brian Coyle, Snehal Raj, Natansh Mathur, and 4 more authors
    npj Quantum Information, 2025
  2. arXiv
    Snehal Raj, and Brian Coyle
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.06916, 2025
  3. arXiv
    Natansh Mathur, Brian Coyle, Nishant Jain, and 4 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.18103, 2025

2023

  1. Quantum
    El Amine Cherrat, Snehal Raj, Iordanis Kerenidis, and 12 more authors
    Quantum, 2023

2021

  1. EMNLP
    Sharmila Reddy Nangi, Atharv Tyagi, Jay Mundra, and 4 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2021

Beyond Research

Playing Drums 🏸 Badminton Table Tennis