“To be considered for the 2017 IEEE Jack Keil Wolf ISIT Student Paper Award.” We provide a sphere-packing lower bound for the optimal error probability in finite blocklengths when coding over a symmetric classical-quantum channel. Our result shows that the pre-factor can be significantly improved from the order of the subexponential to the polynomial, This established pre-factor is arguably optimal because it matches the best known random coding upper bound in the classical case. Our approaches rely on a sharp concentration inequality in strong large deviation theory and crucial properties of the error-exponent function.
“To be considered for the 2017 IEEE Jack Keil Wolf ISIT Student Paper Award.” We provide a sphere-packing lower bound for the optimal error probability in finite blocklengths when coding over a symmetric classical-quantum channel. Our result shows that the pre-factor can be significantly improved from the order of the subexponential to the polynomial, This established pre-factor is arguably optimal because it matches the best known random coding upper bound in the classical case. Our approaches rely on a sharp concentration inequality in strong large deviation theory and crucial properties of the error-exponent function.
We study lower bounds on the optimal error probability in channel coding at rates below capacity, commonly termed sphere-packing bounds. In this work, we establish a sphere-packing bound for classical-quantum channels, which significantly improves previous prefactor from the order of subexponential to polynomial. Furthermore, the gap between the obtained error exponent for constant composition codes and the best known classical random coding exponent vanishes in the order of o(log n/n), indicating our sphere-packing bound is almost exact in the high rate regime. The main technical contributions are two converse Hoeffding bounds for quantum hypothesis testing and the saddle-point properties of error exponent functions.
We study lower bounds on the optimal error probability in classical coding over classical-quantum channels at rates below the capacity, commonly termed quantum sphere-packing bounds. Winter and Dalai have derived such bounds for classical-quantum channels; however, the exponents in their bounds only coincide when the channel is classical. In this paper, we show that these two exponents admit a variational representation and are related by the Golden-Thompson inequality, reaffirming that Dalai's expression is stronger in general classical-quantum channels. Second, we establish a finite blocklength sphere-packing bound for classical-quantum channels, which significantly improves Dalai's prefactor from the order of subexponential to polynomial. Furthermore, the gap between the obtained error exponent for constant composition codes and the best known classical random coding exponent vanishes in the order of o(logn/n), indicating our sphere-packing bound is almost exact in the high rate regime. Finally, for a special class of symmetric classical-quantum channels, we can completely characterize its optimal error probability without the constant composition code assumption. The main technical contributions are two converse Hoeffding bounds for quantum hypothesis testing and the saddle-point properties of error exponent functions.
“To be considered for the 2017 IEEE Jack Keil Wolf ISIT Student Paper Award.” We show that the reliable communication through a classical-quantum channel is possible when the transmission rate approaches the channel capacity sufficiently slowly. This scenario exists between the non-vanishing error probability regime, where the rate tends to capacity with a fixed error, and the small error probability regime, where the error vanishes given a rate below capacity. The proof employs a sharp concentration bound in strong large deviation theory, and the asymptotic expansions of the error-exponent functions.
A fundamental quantity of interest in Shannon theory, classical or quantum, is the optimal error exponent of a given channel W and rate R: the constant E(W,R) which governs the exponential decay of decoding error when using ever larger codes of fixed rate R to communicate over ever more (memoryless) instances of a given channel W. Here I show that a bound by Hayashi [CMP 333, 335 (2015)] for an analogous quantity in privacy amplification implies a lower bound on the error exponent of communication over symmetric classical-quantum channels. The resulting bound matches Dalai’s [IEEE TIT 59, 8027 (2013)] sphere-packing upper bound for rates above a critical value, and reproduces the well-known classical result for symmetric channels. The argument proceeds by first relating the error exponent of privacy amplification to that of compression of classical information with quantum side information, which gives a lower bound that matches the sphere-packing upper bound of Cheng et al. [IEEE TIT 67, 902 (2021)]. In turn, the polynomial prefactors to the sphere-packing bound found by Cheng et al. may be translated to the privacy amplification problem, sharpening a recent result by Li, Yao, and Hayashi [arXiv:2111.01075 [quant-ph]], at least for linear randomness extractors.
A fundamental quantity of interest in Shannon theory, classical or quantum, is the error exponent of a given channel W and rate R: the constantE(W,R)which governs the exponential decay of decoding error when using ever larger optimal codes of fixed rate R to communicate over ever more (memoryless) instances of a given channel W. Nearly matching lower and upper bounds are well-known for classical channels. Here I show a lower bound on the error exponent of communication over arbitrary classical-quantum (CQ) channels which matches Dalai’s sphere-packing upper bound for rates above a critical value, exactly analogous to the case of classical channels. This proves a conjecture made by Holevo in his investigation of the problem. Unlike the classical case, however, the argument does not proceed via a refined analysis of a suitable decoder, but instead by leveraging a bound by Hayashi on the error exponent of the cryptographic task of privacy amplification. This bound is then related to the coding problem via tight entropic uncertainty relations and Gallager’s method of constructing capacity-achieving parity-check codes for arbitrary channels. Along the way, I find a lower bound on the error exponent of the task of compression of classical information relative to quantum side information that matches the sphere-packing upper bound of Cheng et al. In turn, the polynomial prefactors to the sphere-packing bound found by Cheng et al. may be translated to the privacy amplification problem, sharpening a recent result by Li, Yao, and Hayashi, at least for linear randomness extractors.
In this paper, we study the tradeoffs between the error probabilities of classical-quantum channels and the block-length n when the transmission rates approach the channel capacity at a rate lower than 1/√n, a research topic known as moderate deviation analysis. We show that the optimal error probability vanishes under this rate convergence. Our main technical contributions are a tight quantum sphere-packing bound, obtained via Chaganty and Sethuraman's concentration inequality in strong large deviation theory, and asymptotic expansions of error-exponent functions. Moderate deviation analysis for quantum hypothesis testing is also established. The converse directly follows from our channel coding result, while the achievability relies on a martingale inequality.