In the context of two-party interactive quantum communication protocols, we study a recently defined notion of quantum information cost (QIC), which possesses most of the important properties of its classical analogue. Although this definition has the advantage to be valid for fully quantum inputs and tasks, its interpretation for classical tasks remained rather obscure. Also, the link between this new notion and other notions of information cost for quantum protocols that had previously appeared in the literature was not clear, if existent at all. We settle both these issues: for quantum communication with classical inputs, we provide an alternate characterization of QIC in terms of information about the input registers, avoiding any reference to the notion of a purification of the classical input state. We provide an exact operational interpretation of this alternative characterization as the sum of the cost of transmitting information about the classical inputs and the cost of forgetting information about these inputs. To obtain this characterization, we prove a general lemma, the Information Flow Lemma, assessing exactly the transfer of information in general interactive quantum processes. Furthermore, we clarify the link between QIC and IC of classical protocols by simulating quantumly classical protocols. Finally, we apply these concepts to argue that any quantum protocol that does not forget information solves Disjointness on n-bits in Omega (n) communication, completely losing the quadratic quantum speedup. This provides a specific sense in which forgetting information is a necessary feature of interactive quantum protocols. We also apply these concepts to prove that QIC at zero-error is exactly n for the Inner Product function, and n (1 - o(1)) for a random Boolean function on n+n bits.
In the context of two-party interactive quantum communication protocols, we study a recently defined notion of quantum information cost (QIC), which possesses most of the important properties of its classical analogue. Although this definition has the advantage to be valid for fully quantum inputs and tasks, its interpretation for classical tasks remained rather obscure. Also, the link between this new notion and other notions of information cost for quantum protocols that had previously appeared in the literature was not clear, if existent at all. We settle both these issues: for quantum communication with classical inputs, we provide an alternate characterization of QIC in terms of information about the input registers, avoiding any reference to the notion of a purification of the classical input state. We provide an exact operational interpretation of this alternative characterization as the sum of the cost of transmitting information about the classical inputs and the cost of forgetting information about these inputs. To obtain this characterization, we prove a general lemma, the Information Flow Lemma, assessing exactly the transfer of information in general interactive quantum processes. Furthermore, we clarify the link between QIC and IC of classical protocols by simulating quantumly classical protocols. Finally, we apply these concepts to argue that any quantum protocol that does not forget information solves Disjointness on n-bits in Omega (n) communication, completely losing the quadratic quantum speedup. This provides a specific sense in which forgetting information is a necessary feature of interactive quantum protocols. We also apply these concepts to prove that QIC at zero-error is exactly n for the Inner Product function, and n (1 - o(1)) for a random Boolean function on n+n bits.
In two-party quantum communication complexity, Alice and Bob receive some classical inputs and wish to compute some function that depends on both these inputs, while minimizing the communication. This model has found numerous applications in many areas of computer science. One notion that has received a lot of attention recently is the information cost of the protocol, namely how much information the players reveal about their inputs when they run the protocol. In the quantum world, it is not straightforward to define a notion of quantum information cost. We study two different notions and analyze their relation. We also provide new quantum protocols for the Inner Product function and for Private Information Retrieval, and show that protocols for Private Information Retrieval whose classical or quantum information cost for the user is zero can have exponentially different information cost for the server.
We define a new notion of information cost for quantum protocols, and a corresponding notion of quantum information complexity for bipartite quantum channels, and then investigate the properties of such quantities. These are the fully quantum generalizations of the analogous quantities for bipartite classical functions that have found many applications recently, in particular for proving communication complexity lower bounds. Our definition is strongly tied to the quantum state redistribution task. Previous attempts have been made to define such a quantity for quantum protocols, with particular applications in mind; our notion differs from these in many respects. First, it directly provides a lower bound on the quantum communication cost, independent of the number of rounds of the underlying protocol. Secondly, we provide an operational interpretation for quantum information complexity: we show that it is exactly equal to the amortized quantum communication complexity of a bipartite channel on a given state. This generalizes a result of Braverman and Rao to quantum protocols, and even strengthens the classical result in a bounded round scenario. Also, this provides an analogue of the Schumacher source compression theorem for interactive quantum protocols, and answers a question raised by Braverman. We also discuss some potential applications to quantum communication complexity lower bounds by specializing our definition for classical functions and inputs. Building on work of Jain, Radhakrishnan and Sen, we provide new evidence suggesting that the bounded round quantum communication complexity of the disjointness function is Ω(n/M + M), for M-message protocols. This would match the best known upper bound.
Quantum information complexity (QIC), introduced by Touchette [Touchette, STOC 2015], has been shown to be one of the most powerful methods for proving quantum communication complexity and has also been shown to be equal to amortized quantum communication complexity. Unfortunately, QIC is generally hard to analyze because it is a sum of quantum conditional mutual information terms, which are difficult to estimate. In this work, we introduce a new variational approach, the information potential, for analyzing QIC and proving quantum communication lower bounds inspired by the resolvent representation for quantum relative entropy. This approach connects the QIC of individual messages to a quadratic form, making it more amenable and thus enables us to bound the cumulative positive increments of the potential throughout an interactive quantum protocol by its QIC. Lower bounds on the growth of the potential therefore translate into lower bounds on both QIC and quantum communication complexity.
As an application, we give an optimal Ω(1/r) lower bound on the QIC of the two-bit AND function as well as an optimal Ω(n/r) lower bound on the quantum communication complexity of r-round Set-Disjointness, answering an open problem in~[Braverman, Garg, Ko, Mao, Touchette FOCS 2015]. Moreover, we further prove a direct-sum theorem for bounded-round quantum communication complexity of Set Disjointness. With the tight bound on the QIC of AND function, we further establish a nearly tight tradeoff for the asymmetric quantum communication complexity of SetDisjointness: (qA+1)(qB+1)=Ω(n), where qA and qB denote the total numbers of qubits sent by Alice and Bob, respectively.
We consider memoryless quantum communication protocols, where the two parties do not possess any memory besides their classical input and they take turns performing unitary operations on a pure quantum state that they exchange between them. Most known quantum protocols are of this type and recently a deep connection between memoryless protocols and Bell inequality violations has been explored recently by Buhrman et al. We study the information cost of memoryless quantum protocols by looking at a canonical problem: bounded-round quantum communication protocols for the one-bit AND function. We prove directly a tight lower bound of Θ(log(k)/k) for the information cost of AND for k-round memoryless quantum protocols and for the input distribution needed for the Disjointness function. It is not clear if memoryless protocols allow for a reduction between AND and Disjointness, due to the absence of private workspaces. We enhance the model by allowing the players to keep in their private classical workspace apart from their input also some classical private coins. Surprisingly, we show that every quantum protocol can be transformed into an equivalent quantum protocol with private coins that is perfectly private, i.e. the players only learn the value of the function and nothing more. Last, we consider the model where the players are allowed to use one-shot coins, i.e. private coins that can be used only once during the protocol. While in the classical case, private coins and one-shot coins are equivalent, in the quantum case, we prove that they are not. More precisely, we show that every quantum memoryless protocol with one-bit inputs that uses one-shot coins can be transformed into a memoryless quantum protocol without private coins and without increasing too much its information cost. Hence, while private coins always allow for private quantum protocols, one-shot coins do not.
We define a new notion of information cost for quantum protocols, and a corresponding notion of quantum information complexity for bipartite quantum tasks. These are the fully quantum generalizations of the analogous quantities for bipartite classical tasks that have found many applications recently, in particular for proving communication complexity lower bounds and direct sum theorems. Finding such a quantum generalization of information complexity was one of the open problems recently raised by Braverman (STOC'12).
In some scenarios there are ways of conveying information with many fewer, even exponentially fewer, qubits than possible classically. Moreover, some of these methods have a very simple structure-they involve only few message exchanges between the communicating parties. It is therefore natural to ask whether every classical protocol may be transformed to a "simpler" quantum protocol-one that has similar efficiency, but uses fewer message exchanges. We show that for any constant k, there is a problem such that its k+1 message classical communication complexity is exponentially smaller than its k message quantum communication complexity. This, in particular, proves a round hierarchy theorem for quantum communication complexity, and implies, via a simple reduction, an Omega(N1k/) lower bound for k message quantum protocols for Set Disjointness for constant k. Enroute, we prove information-theoretic lemmas, and define a related measure of correlation, the informational distance, that we believe may be of significance in other contexts as well