While quantum interactive proof systems using at least three messages can achieve perfect completeness, as shown by Kitaev and Watrous (STOC 2000), whether perfect completeness is achievable for one- and two-message quantum proof systems has remained open. For the one-message case, whether
QMA can achieve perfect completeness was posed as an open problem in Watrous (FOCS 2000) and Aharonov and Naveh (2002); for the two-message case, the corresponding problems were (implicitly) posed in Jain, Upadhyay, and Watrous~(FOCS 2009) and Kobayashi, Le Gall, and Nishimura (SICOMP, 2019).
In this work, we establish that
QIP(2),
qq-QAM,
QAM, and
QMA can achieve perfect completeness. Here
qq-QAM denotes the class of promise problems admitting two-message quantum-public-coin quantum interactive proof systems in which the verifier's only message consists of half-EPR pairs. Our main technical contributions are the follows:
1. For
QMA (and directly for
QAM), an exactly constructible block-encoded matrix whose kernel certifies yes instances, constructed from the acceptance operator induced by the verification circuit. This also yields an alternative proof of
QCMA=QCMA1.
2. For
QIP(2) (and implicitly
qq-QAM), a new turn-halving transformation that preserves completeness and ensures that the resulting proof system retains at least two messages, provided that the terminal state before the final measurement is efficiently preparable.
This work considers the quantum interactive proof system model of computation, which is the (classical) interactive proof system model’s natural quantum computational analogue. An exact characterization of the expressive power of quantum interactive proof systems is obtained: the collection of computational problems having quantum interactive proof systems consists precisely of those problems solvable by deterministic Turing machines that use at most a polynomial amount of space (or, more succinctly, QIP = PSPACE). This characterization is proved through the use of a parallelized form of the matrix multiplicative weights update method, applied to a class of semidefinite programs that captures the computational power of quantum interactive proof systems. One striking implication of this characterization is that quantum computing provides no increase in computational power whatsoever over classical computing in the context of interactive proof systems, for it is well known that the collection of computational problems having classical interactive proof systems coincides with those problems solvable by polynomial-space computations.
We provide an alternative proof of \class{QIP}=\class{PSPACE} to the recent breakthrough result. Unlike solving some semidefinite programs that captures the computational power of quantum interactive proofs, our method starts with one \class{QIP}-Complete problem which computes the diamond norm between two admissible quantum channels. The key observation is that we can convert the computation of the diamond norm into the computation of some equilibrium value. The later problem, different from the former semidefinite programs, is of better form, easier to solve and could be interesting for its own sake. The multiplicative weight update method is also applied to solve the equilibrium value problem, however, in a relatively simpler way than the one in the original proof. As a direct byproduct, we also provide a NC algorithm to compute the diamond norm of a class of quantum channels. Furthermore, we provide a generalized form of equilibrium value problems that can be solved in the same way as well as comparisons to semidefinite programs.