Whether winning blackjack or navigating busy streets, achieving desired outcomes requires agents to execute adaptive strategies, strategies where actions depend contextually on past events. In complexity science, this motivates memory as an operational quantifier of complexity: given two strategies, the more complex one demands the agent to track more about the past. Here, we show that conclusions about complexity fundamentally depend on whether agents can process and store quantum information. Thus, while classical agents might find Strategy A more complex to execute than Strategy B, quantum agents can reach the opposite conclusion. We derive sufficient conditions for such contradictory conclusions and illustrate the phenomenon across multiple scenarios. As a byproduct, our results yield an information-theoretic lower bound on the minimal memory required by any agent - classical or quantum - to execute a given strategy.
Adaptive agents realise complex reactive behaviours by using a memory of past input stimuli and output actions to guide structured future responses. Quantum adaptive agents can operate while storing less information in memory than optimal classical counterparts; yet, this does not necessarily translate into a reduced dimension of the memory that must be physically realised. We introduce a route-truncate-repair procedure that can convert entropic quantum memory advantages into reductions in memory dimension. Routing a reference input process through an agent yields a temporal matrix product state representation whose canonical bond is identified with the joint reference--agent memory. Truncating the agent's share of this bond and locally repairing the resulting dynamics produces a smaller, physically-valid agent that remains capable of responding to arbitrary input sequences. A fidelity-divergence certificate quantifies the resulting trade-off between accuracy and memory dimension. Benchmark adaptive processes exhibit substantial dimension reduction whilst preserving the underlying behaviour with high fidelity. The construction extends to feedback and coherent quantum interactions, with accuracy guarantees under arbitrary adaptive interrogation for a class of agents. For a resettable clock, four quantum memory dimensions attain an input--output fidelity divergence rate first matched with eleven states in our search over classical reduced models. These results establish a route from entropic memory advantages to practical, dimension-reduced adaptive quantum agents.
Agents often execute complex strategies, adapting their response to each input stimulus depending on past observations and actions. Here, we derive the minimal energetic cost for classical agents to execute a given strategy, highlighting that they must dissipate a certain amount of heat with each decision beyond Landauer's limit. We then prove that quantum agents can reduce this dissipation below classical limits. We establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for a strategy to guarantee quantum agents have energetic advantage, and illustrate settings where this advantage grows without bound. Our results establish a fundamental energetic advantage for agents utilizing quantum processing to enact complex adaptive behavior.
Effective and efficient forecasting relies on identification of the relevant information contained in past observations -- the predictive features -- and isolating it from the rest. When the future of a process bears a strong dependence on its behaviour far into the past, there are many such features to store, necessitating complex models with extensive memories. Here, we highlight a family of stochastic processes whose minimal classical models must devote unboundedly many bits to tracking the past. For this family, we identify quantum models of equal accuracy that can store all relevant information within a single two-dimensional quantum system (qubit). This represents the ultimate limit of quantum compression and highlights an immense practical advantage of quantum technologies for the forecasting and simulation of complex systems.
World models provide digital simulacra of the true world, allowing agents to be trained and tested before costly real-world deployment. At each time step, they receive an action and generate an observation and reward matching the statistics of the true world. In complex environments where present outcomes depend on events far in the past, this requires memory. One might expect that, by increasing memory, we can always build a model accurately enough to align the optimal agent policies of the real and virtual worlds. We show that this is false for classical world models, even when the true world itself is classical. We construct true worlds for which every finite classical model fails along the same possible trajectory: it either loses the ability to distinguish actions when the true world clearly prefers one, or repeatedly assigns the highest expected reward to suboptimal actions. Its expected-reward estimates also retain a nonvanishing average error. In contrast, each such true world admits a quantum world model using a single qutrit that reproduces it exactly: its reward estimates and preferred actions always match those of the true world, ensuring that the optimal policies of the real and virtual worlds remain perfectly aligned.
Quantum process tomography, the task of learning an unknown quantum channel from black-box access, is a central problem in quantum information. In this setting, protocols with quantum memory can coherently store and jointly process quantum information obtained from multiple channel uses, whereas protocols without quantum memory must measure after each use and retain only a classical transcript of the measurement outcomes. A fundamental open question is whether quantum memory provides a query-complexity advantage even when protocols without quantum memory may adapt their experiments based on all previous outcomes with unbounded classical computational power. In this work, we show that it does. We determine the optimal query complexity of quantum process tomography without quantum memory up to a constant factor to be
Θ(din3dout3/ε2), where
din and
dout are the channel input and output dimensions, respectively, and
ε is the target diamond-norm accuracy. More precisely, we prove that any incoherent protocol for this task, including adaptive protocols, requires
Ω(din3dout3/ε2) queries, even when each channel use may be assisted by arbitrary fresh ancilla, and we present a non-adaptive, ancilla-free incoherent protocol achieving the matching upper bound
O(din3dout3/ε2). Our results thereby generalize the optimal sample-complexity bounds for single-copy state tomography, recovered as the special case
din=1. By contrast, coherent protocols with quantum memory achieve query complexity
Θ(din2dout2/ε2). Hence, our results establish a rigorous learning separation between quantum process tomography with and without quantum memory.