  Kearns' statistical query (SQ) oracle (STOC'93) lends a unifying perspective
for most classical machine learning algorithms. This ceases to be true in
quantum learning, where many settings do not admit, neither an SQ analog nor a
quantum statistical query (QSQ) analog. In this work, we take inspiration from
Kearns' SQ oracle and Valiant's weak evaluation oracle (TOCT'14) and establish
a unified perspective bridging the statistical and parametrized learning
paradigms in a novel way. We explore the problem of learning from an evaluation
oracle, which provides an estimate of function values, and introduce an
extensive yet intuitive framework that yields unconditional lower bounds for
learning from evaluation queries and characterizes the query complexity for
learning linear function classes. The framework is directly applicable to the
QSQ setting and virtually all algorithms based on loss function optimization.
  Our first application is to extend prior results on the learnability of
output distributions of quantum circuits and Clifford unitaries from the SQ to
the (multi-copy) QSQ setting, implying exponential separations between learning
stabilizer states from (multi-copy) QSQs versus from quantum samples. Our
second application is to analyze some popular quantum machine learning (QML)
settings. We gain an intuitive picture of the hardness of many QML tasks which
goes beyond existing methods such as barren plateaus and the statistical
dimension, and contains crucial setting-dependent implications. Our framework
not only unifies the perspective of cost concentration with that of the
statistical dimension in a unified language but exposes their connectedness and
similarity.
