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arXiv:2004.10587 · IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

The Semiring of Dichotomies and Asymptotic Relative Submajorization

Christopher Perry, Péter Vrana, Albert H. Werner

Published Oct 5, 2021• 0 citations
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Abstract

We study quantum dichotomies and the resource theory of asymmetric distinguishability using a generalization of Strassen’s theorem on preordered semirings. We find that an asymptotic variant of relative submajorization, defined on unnormalized dichotomies, is characterized by real-valued monotones that are multiplicative under the tensor product and additive under the direct sum. These strong constraints allow us to classify and explicitly describe all such monotones, leading to a rate formula expressed as an optimization involving sandwiched Rényi divergences. As an application we give a new derivation of the strong converse error exponent in quantum hypothesis testing.

DOI
10.1109/tit.2021.3117440

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We study quantum dichotomies and the resource theory of asymmetric distinguishability using a generalization of Strassen’s theorem on preordered semirings. We find that an asymptotic variant of relative submajorization, defined on unnormalized dichotomies, is characterized by real-valued monotones that are multiplicative under the tensor product and additive under the direct sum. These strong constraints allow us to classify and explicitly describe all such monotones, leading to a rate formula expressed as an optimization involving sandwiched Rényi divergences. As an application we give a new derivation of the strong converse error exponent in quantum hypothesis testing.
We study quantum dichotomies and the resource theory of asymmetric distinguishability using a generalization of Strassen's theorem on preordered semirings. We find that an asymptotic variant of relative submajorization, defined on unnormalized dichotomies, is characterized by real-valued monotones that are multiplicative under the tensor product and additive under the direct sum. These strong constraints allow us to classify and explicitly describe all such monotones, leading to a rate formula expressed as an optimization involving sandwiched Renyi divergences. As an application we give a new derivation of the strong converse error exponent in quantum hypothesis testing.
Abstract Pairs of states, or “boxes” are the basic objects in the resource theory of asymmetric distinguishability (Wang and Wilde in Phys Rev Res 1(3):033170, 2019. 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.1.033170 ), where free operations are arbitrary quantum channels that are applied to both states. From this point of view, hypothesis testing is seen as a process by which a standard form of distinguishability is distilled. Motivated by the more general problem of quantum state discrimination, we consider boxes of a fixed finite number of states and study an extension of the relative submajorization preorder to such objects. In this relation, a tuple of positive operators is greater than another if there is a completely positive trace nonincreasing map under which the image of the first tuple satisfies certain semidefinite constraints relative to the other one. This preorder characterizes error probabilities in the case of testing a composite null hypothesis against a simple alternative hypothesis, as well as certain error probabilities in state discrimination. We present a sufficient condition for the existence of catalytic transformations between boxes, and a characterization of an associated asymptotic preorder, both expressed in terms of sandwiched Rényi divergences. This characterization of the asymptotic preorder directly shows that the strong converse exponent for a composite null hypothesis is equal to the maximum of the corresponding exponents for the pairwise simple hypothesis testing tasks.
We study a generalization of relative submajorization that compares pairs of positive operators on representation spaces of some fixed group. A pair equivariantly relatively submajorizes another if there is an equivariant subnormalized channel that takes the components of the first pair to a pair satisfying similar positivity constraints as in the definition of relative submajorization. In the context of the resource theory approach to thermodynamics, this generalization allows one to study transformations by Gibbs-preserving maps that are in addition time-translation symmetric. We find a sufficient condition for the existence of catalytic transformations and a characterization of an asymptotic relaxation of the relation. For classical and certain quantum pairs the characterization is in terms of explicit monotone quantities related to the sandwiched quantum Rényi divergences. In the general quantum case the relevant quantities are given only implicitly. Nevertheless, we find a large collection of monotones that provide necessary conditions for asymptotic or catalytic transformations. When applied to time-translation symmetric maps, these give rise to second laws that constrain state transformations allowed by thermal operations even in the presence of catalysts.
Motivated by the problem of constructing fast matrix multiplication algorithms, Strassen (FOCS 1986, Crelle 1987–1991) introduced and developed the theory of asymptotic spectra of tensors. For any sub-semiring X \mathcal {X} of tensors (under direct sum and tensor product), the duality theorem that is at the core of this theory characterizes basic asymptotic properties of the elements of X \mathcal {X} in terms of the asymptotic spectrum of X \mathcal {X} , which is defined as the collection of semiring homomorphisms from X \mathcal {X} to the non-negative reals with a natural monotonicity property. The asymptotic properties characterized by this duality encompass fundamental problems in complexity theory, combinatorics and quantum information. Universal spectral points are elements in the asymptotic spectrum of the semiring of all tensors. Finding all universal spectral points suffices to find the asymptotic spectrum of any sub-semiring. The construction of non-trivial universal spectral points has been an open problem for more than thirty years. We construct, for the first time, a family of non-trivial universal spectral points over the complex numbers, called quantum functionals . We moreover prove that the quantum functionals precisely characterise the asymptotic slice rank of complex tensors. Our construction, which relies on techniques from quantum information theory and representation theory, connects the asymptotic spectrum of tensors to the quantum marginal problem and entanglement polytopes.
Distinguishability is a central concept in information theory and extends naturally to quantum systems. This work shows that, for any two finite-dimensional memoryless quantum channels, parallel, adaptive and general testing strategies achieve the same Stein exponent at every fixed type-I error tolerance ε∈(0,1)ε\in(0,1)ε∈(0,1), namely the regularized channel relative entropy. When this rate is finite, any larger type-II exponent forces the probability of correctly accepting the null hypothesis to decay exponentially. Thus, adaptivity provides no asymptotic advantage. The key step is proving the continuity of the regularized sandwiched Rényi channel divergence at order one. We also derive the exact strong-converse exponent for general testers.
Abstract The asymptotic restriction problem for tensors can be reduced to finding all parameters that are normalized, monotone under restrictions, additive under direct sums and multiplicative under tensor products, the simplest of which are the flattening ranks. Over the complex numbers, a refinement of this problem, originating in the theory of quantum entanglement, is to find the optimal rate of entanglement transformations as a function of the error exponent. This trade-off can also be characterized in terms of the set of normalized, additive, multiplicative functionals that are monotone in a suitable sense, which includes the restriction-monotones as well. For example, the flattening ranks generalize to the (exponentiated) Rényi entanglement entropies of order α∈[0,1]\alpha \in [0,1]α∈[0,1] α ∈ [ 0 , 1 ] . More complicated parameters of this type are known, which interpolate between the flattening ranks or Rényi entropies for special bipartitions, with one of the parts being a single tensor factor. We introduce a new construction of subadditive and submultiplicative monotones in terms of a regularized Rényi divergence between many copies of the pure state represented by the tensor and a suitable sequence of positive operators. We give explicit families of operators that correspond to the flattening-based functionals, and show that they can be combined in a nontrivial way using weighted operator geometric means. This leads to a new characterization of the previously known additive and multiplicative monotones, and gives new submultiplicative and subadditive monotones that interpolate between the Rényi entropies for all bipartitions. We show that for each such monotone there exist pointwise smaller multiplicative and additive ones as well. In addition, we find lower bounds on the new functionals that are superadditive and supermultiplicative.