In this short note, I show how a recent result of Alhejji and Smith (A tight uniform continuity bound for equivocation, 2019. arXiv:1909.00787v1) regarding an optimal uniform continuity bound for classical conditional entropy leads to an optimal uniform continuity bound for quantum conditional entropy of classical–quantum states. The bound is optimal in the sense that there always exists a pair of classical–quantum states saturating the bound, and so, no further improvements are possible. An immediate application is a uniform continuity bound for the entanglement of formation that improves upon the one previously given by Winter (Commun Math Phys 347(1):291–313, 2016. arXiv:1507.07775). Two intriguing open questions are raised regarding other possible uniform continuity bounds for conditional entropy: one about quantum–classical states and another about fully quantum bipartite states.
We prove the sharp uniform continuity bound for quantum conditional entropy. If two bipartite states are at trace distance at most
δ and
d=dimA, the optimal dimension-only modulus of continuity is
h2(δ)+δlog(d2−1) up to
δ=1−d−2 and
2logd thereafter, where
h2 denotes the binary entropy. When
dimB≥d, this bound is tight for every
δ∈[0,1]. The key proof idea was developed with the assistance of ChatGPT 5.6 Sol, building on and adapting the tight classical proof of Alhejji \& Smith [IEEE ISIT (2020)], which follows a conceptually different approach.