Hypothesis testing is an important task in mathematics and physics. Hypothesis testing of two random variables is related to the Kullback-Leibler divergence of the two corresponding distributions. Similarly, quantum hypothesis testing of two quantum states is characterized by the quantum relative entropy. While a quantum state can be abstracted as a device that only has outputs but no inputs, the most general quantum device is a quantum channel that also has inputs. In this work, we extend hypothesis testing to general quantum channels. In both the one-shot and asymptotic scenario, we study several quantifiers for hypothesis testing under different assumptions of how the channels are used. As the quantifiers are analogs to the quantum relative entropy of states, we call them the quantum relative entropy of channels. Then, we define the entropy of channels based on relative entropies from the target channel to the completely depolarizing channel. We investigate the properties that the quantum relative entropy of channels should satisfy, and we study its interplay with entanglement. With the broad applications of the quantum relative entropy of states, our results can be useful for understanding general properties of quantum channels.
In this work, we study two different approaches to defining the entropy of a quantum channel. One of these is based on the von Neumann entropy of the corresponding Choi-Jamiołkowski state. The second one is based on the relative entropy of the output of the extended channel relative to the output of the extended completely depolarizing channel. This entropy then needs to be optimized over all possible input states. Our results first show that the former entropy provides an upper bound on the latter. Next, we show that for unital qubit channels, this bound is saturated. Finally, we conjecture and provide numerical intuitions that the bound can also be saturated for random channels as their dimension tends to infinity.
The von Neumann entropy is a central concept in physics and information theory, having a number of compelling physical interpretations. There is a certain perspective that the most fundamental notion in quantum mechanics is that of a quantum channel, as quantum states, unitary evolutions, measurements, and discarding of quantum systems can each be regarded as certain kinds of quantum channels. Thus, an important goal is to define a consistent and meaningful notion of the entropy of a quantum channel. Motivated by the fact that the entropy of a state ρ can be formulated as the difference of the number of physical qubits and the “relative entropy distance” between ρ and the maximally mixed state, here we define the entropy of a channel N as the difference of the number of physical qubits of the channel output with the “relative entropy distance” between N and the completely depolarizing channel. We establish that this definition satisfies all of the axioms, recently put forward in [Dour, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 65, 5880 (2019)], required for a channel entropy function. The task of quantum channel merging, in which the goal is for the receiver to merge his share of the channel with the environment's share, gives a compelling operational interpretation of the entropy of a channel. We define Rényi and min-entropies of a channel and establish that they satisfy the axioms required for a channel entropy function. Among other results, we also establish that a smoothed version of the min-entropy of a channel satisfies the asymptotic equipartition property.
Abstract A quantum channel is sufficient with respect to a set of input states if it can be reversed on this set. In the approximate version, the input states can be recovered within an error bounded by the decrease of the relative entropy under the channel. Using a new integral representation of the relative entropy in Frenkel (Integral formula for quantum relative entropy implies data processing inequality, Quantum 7, 1102 (2023)), we present an easy proof of a characterization of sufficient quantum channels and recoverability by preservation of optimal success probabilities in hypothesis testing problems, equivalently, by preservation of
L1 L 1 -distance.
We study the problem of communication over compound quantum channel in the presence of entanglement. Classically such channels are modeled as a collection of conditional probability distributions wherein neither the sender nor the receiver is aware of the channel being used for transmission, except for the fact that it belongs to this collection. We provide achievability and converse bounds for this problem in the one shot quantum setting in terms of quantum hypothesis testing relative-entropy. Our achievability proof is similar in spirit to its classical counterpart. To arrive at our result, we use the technique of position based decoding along with a new approach for constructing a union of two projectors, which can be of independent interest.
The von Neumann entropy of a quantum state is a central concept in physics and information theory, having a number of compelling physical interpretations. There is a certain perspective that the most fundamental notion in quantum mechanics is that of a quantum channel, as quantum states, unitary evolutions, measurements, and discarding of quantum systems can each be regarded as certain kinds of quantum channels. Thus, an important goal is to define a consistent and meaningful notion of the entropy of a quantum channel. Motivated by the fact that the entropy of a state ρ can be formulated as the difference of the number of physical qubits and the "relative entropy distance"between ρ and the maximally mixed state, here we define the entropy of a channel N as the difference of the number of physical qubits of the channel output with the "relative entropy distance"between N and the completely depolarizing channel. We prove that this definition satisfies all of the axioms, recently put forward by Gour [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 65, 5880 (2019)IETTAW0018-944810.1109/TIT.2019.2907989], required for a channel entropy function. The task of quantum channel merging, in which the goal is for the receiver to merge his share of the channel with the environment's share, gives a compelling operational interpretation of the entropy of a channel. The entropy of a channel can be negative for certain channels, but this negativity has an operational interpretation in terms of the channel merging protocol. We define Rényi and min-entropies of a channel and prove that they satisfy the axioms required for a channel entropy function. Among other results, we also prove that a smoothed version of the min-entropy of a channel satisfies the asymptotic equipartition property.
The task of binary quantum hypothesis testing is to determine the state of a quantum system via measurements on it, given the side information that it is in one of two possible states, say
ρ and
σ. This task is generally studied in either the symmetric setting, in which the two possible errors incurred in the task (the so-called type I and type II errors) are treated on an equal footing, or the asymmetric setting in which one minimizes the type II error probability under the constraint that the corresponding type I error probability is below a given threshold. Here we define a one-parameter family of binary quantum hypothesis testing tasks, which we call
s-hypothesis testing, and in which the relative significance of the two errors are weighted by a parameter
s. In particular,
s-hypothesis testing interpolates continuously between the regimes of symmetric and asymmetric hypothesis testing. Moreover, if arbitrarily many identical copies of the system are assumed to be available, then the minimal error probability of
s-hypothesis testing is shown to decay exponentially in the number of copies, with a decay rate given by a quantum divergence which we denote as
ξs(ρ∥σ), and which satisfies a host of interesting properties. Moreover, this one-parameter family of divergences interpolates continuously between the corresponding decay rates for symmetric hypothesis testing (the quantum Chernoff divergence) for
s=1, and asymmetric hypothesis testing (the Umegaki relative entropy) for
s=0.