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arXiv:1312.7642 · IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT)

On simultaneous min-entropy smoothing

Lukas Drescher, Omar Fawzi

Published Jul 1, 2013• 22 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In the context of network information theory, one often needs a multiparty probability distribution to be typical in several ways simultaneously. When considering quantum states instead of classical ones, it is in general difficult to prove the existence of a state that is jointly typical. Such a difficulty was recently emphasized and conjectures on the existence of such states were formulated. In this paper, we consider a one-shot multiparty typicality conjecture. The question can then be stated easily: is it possible to smooth the largest eigenvalues of all the marginals of a multipartite state ρ simultaneously while staying close to ρ? We prove the answer is yes whenever the marginals of the state commute. In the general quantum case, we prove that simultaneous smoothing is possible if the number of parties is two or more generally if the marginals to optimize satisfy some non-overlap property.

DOI
10.1109/isit.2013.6620208

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In the context of network information theory, one often needs a multiparty probability distribution to be typical in several ways simultaneously. When considering quantum states instead of classical ones, it is in general difficult to prove the existence of a state that is jointly typical. Such a difficulty was recently emphasized and conjectures on the existence of such states were formulated. In this paper, we consider a one-shot multiparty typicality conjecture. The question can then be stated easily: is it possible to smooth the largest eigenvalues of all the marginals of a multipartite state ρ simultaneously while staying close to ρ? We prove the answer is yes whenever the marginals of the state commute. In the general quantum case, we prove that simultaneous smoothing is possible if the number of parties is two or more generally if the marginals to optimize satisfy some non-overlap property.
We establish exact thresholds for the failure of simultaneous quantum typicality: three parties for mixed states and four for pure states. For the four-qubit Higuchi--Sudbery state, every sequence satisfying the expected purity bounds on three overlapping marginals, with sufficiently small fixed positive entropy slack, is asymptotically perfectly distinguishable from the tensor powers of the input: its trace distance from them tends to the maximum value 222. This maximal separation persists, with a common positive slack, throughout an open neighborhood in the full four-qubit state space. Tracing out one party yields a mixed tripartite example. The proof connects simultaneous quantum smoothing with polynomial concentration on $\CP^1$. Symmetry reduces the problem to a frame inequality on $\Sym^n(\mathbb C^2)$, where a linear entropy deficit competes with a quadratic cost of polynomial concentration. Bernstein--Markov estimates and a subharmonic barrier control this cost, yielding an exponential obstruction to simultaneous typicality. These results disprove Dutil's multiparty quantum typicality conjecture, formulated in 2011, and the one-shot simultaneous min-entropy-smoothing conjectures of Drescher--Fawzi and Colomer--Winter. Together with the positive results for smaller systems, they determine the smallest numbers of parties at which simultaneous typicality can fail.
A fundamental tool to prove inner bounds in classical network information theory is the so-called `conditional joint typicality lemma'. In addition to the lemma, one often uses unions and intersections of typical sets in the inner bound arguments without so much as giving them a second thought. These arguments fail spectacularly in the quantum setting. This bottleneck shows up in the fact that so-called `simultaneous decoders', as opposed to `successive cancellation decoders', are known for very few channels in quantum network information theory. Another manifestation of this bottleneck is the lack of so-called `simutaneous smoothing' theorems for quantum states. In this paper, we overcome the bottleneck by proving for the first time a one-shot quantum joint typicality lemma with robust union and intersection properties. To do so, we develop two novel tools in quantum information theory which may be of independent interest. The first tool is a simple geometric idea called `tilting', which increases the angles between a family of subspaces in orthogonal directions. The second tool, called `smoothing', is a way of perturbing a multipartite quantum state such that the partial trace over any subset of registers does not increase the operator norm by much. Our joint typicality lemma allows us to construct simultaneous quantum decoders for many multiterminal quantum channels. It provides a powerful tool to extend many results in classical network information theory to the one-shot quantum setting.
Abstract We show that a simple telescoping sum trick, together with the triangle inequality and a tensorisation property of expected-contractive coefficients of random channels, allow us to achieve general simultaneous decoupling for multiple users via local actions. Employing both old (Dupuis et al. in Commun Math Phys 328:251–284, 2014) and new methods (Dupuis in IEEE Trans Inf Theory 69:7784–7792, 2023), we obtain bounds on the expected deviation from ideal decoupling either in the one-shot setting in terms of smooth min-entropies, or the finite block length setting in terms of Rényi entropies. These bounds are essentially optimal without the need to address the simultaneous smoothing conjecture, which remains unresolved. This leads to one-shot, finite block length, and asymptotic achievability results for several tasks in quantum Shannon theory, including local randomness extraction of multiple parties, multi-party assisted entanglement concentration, multi-party quantum state merging, and quantum coding for the quantum multiple access channel. Because of the one-shot nature of our protocols, we obtain achievability results without the need for time-sharing, which at the same time leads to easy proofs of the asymptotic coding theorems. We show that our one-shot decoupling bounds furthermore yield achievable rates (so far only conjectured) for all four tasks in compound settings, which are additionally optimal for entanglement of assistance and state merging.
We provide a powerful machinery to prove fully smooth one shot multipartite covering, aka convex split, type results for quantum states. In the important case of smooth multipartite convex split for classical quantum states, aka smooth multipartite soft covering, our machinery works even when certain marginals of these states do not satisfy pairwise independence. The recent paper (arXiv:2410.17893) gave the first proof of fully smooth multipartite convex split by simplifying and extending a technique called telescoping, developed originally for convex split by (arXiv:2304.12056). However, that work as well as all earlier works on convex split assumed pairwise or even more independence amongst suitable marginals of the quantum states. We develop our machinery by leveraging known results from (arXiv:1806.07278) involving tilting and augmentation smoothing of quantum states, combined with a novel observation that a natural quantum operation `flattening' quantum states actually preserves the fidelity. This machinery is powerful enough to lead to non pairwise independent results as mentioned above. As an application of our soft covering lemma without pairwise independence, we prove the `natural' one shot inner bounds for sending private classical information over a quantum wiretap interference channel, even when the classical encoders at the input lose pairwise independence in their encoding strategies to a certain extent. This result was unknown earlier even in the classical setting.
We give a proof of the multi-party typicality conjecture for the first nontrivial case when there are only two parties. The conjecture itself is motivated by the study of multi-party state merging protocols on quantum systems. Our approach is based on fundamental group-theoretical properties, thereby providing an opportunity to study the problem from a more systematic perspective. Our proof also covers an extended multiparty typicality conjecture that we state in this work. This extended multiparty typicality conjecture is formulated using arbitrary kkk-norms instead of only the 222-norm as in the original conjecture.
Abstract We present an iterative algorithm based on semidefinite programming (SDP) for computing the quantum smooth max-mutual information Imax⁡ε(ρAB)I^\varepsilon _{\max }(\rho _{AB})Imaxε​(ρAB​) I max ε ( ρ AB ) of bipartite quantum states in any dimension. The algorithm is accurate if a rank condition for marginal states within the smoothing environment is satisfied and provides an upper bound otherwise. Central to our method is a novel SDP, for which we establish primal and dual formulations and prove strong duality. With the direct application of bounding the one-shot distillable key of a quantum state, this contribution extends SDP-based techniques in quantum information theory. Thereby it improves the capabilities to compute or estimate information measures with application to various quantum information processing tasks.