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arXiv:2207.12075

The Quantum Advantage in Decentralized Control

Shashank A. Deshpande, Ankur A. Kulkarni

Published Jul 25, 2022• 4 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

It is known in the context of decentralised control that there exist control strategies consistent with the requirements of a given information structure, yet physically unimplementable through any amount of passive common randomness. This imposes a natural set of limitations on what is achievable through common randomness in both cooperative and competitive settings. We show that it is possible to breach these limitations with the use of quantum-physical architectures. In particular, we present a class of stochastic strategies that leverage quantum entanglement to produce strategic distributions which compose a strict superclass of strategies implemented through passive common randomness. We investigate numerically, the `quantum advantage' offered by this new class over a parametric family of cooperative decision problems with static information structure. We demonstrate through variations across the parametric family that fundamental decision theoretic elements such as information and the cost determine the manifestation of quantum advantage in a given control problem. Our work motivates a novel decision and control paradigm with an enlarged space of control policies achievable by means of quantum architectures.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2207.12075

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It is known in the context of decentralised control that there exist control strategies consistent with the requirements of a given information structure, yet physically unimplementable through any amount of passive common randomness. This imposes a natural set of limitations on what is achievable through common randomness in both cooperative and competitive settings. We show that it is possible to breach these limitations with the use of quantum-physical architectures. In particular, we present a class of stochastic strategies that leverage quantum entanglement to produce strategic distributions which compose a strict superclass of strategies implemented through passive common randomness. We investigate numerically, the `quantum advantage' offered by this new class over a parametric family of cooperative decision problems with static information structure. We demonstrate through variations across the parametric family that fundamental decision theoretic elements such as information and the cost determine the manifestation of quantum advantage in a given control problem. Our work motivates a novel decision and control paradigm with an enlarged space of control policies achievable by means of quantum architectures.
We have shown that entanglement assisted stochastic strategies allow access to strategic measures beyond the classically correlated measures accessible through passive common randomness, and thus attain a quantum advantage in decentralised control. In this two part series of articles, we investigate the decision theoretic origins of the quantum advantage within a broad superstructure of problem classes. Each class in our binary team superstructure corresponds to a parametric family of cost functions with a distinct algebraic structure. In this part, identify the only problem classes that benefit from quantum strategies. We find that these cost structures admit a special decision-theoretic feature -- `the coordination dilemma'. Our analysis hence reveals some intuition towards the utility of non-local quantum correlations in decentralised control.
Ananthram and Borkar [1] showed that there exist strategies that are consistent with the requirements of a decentralized information structure but are unattainable through the use of common randomness. This opens the question of discovering physically realisable mechanisms that provide access to this region of the strategic space. In our previous work we introduced a class of quantum strategies that allow such access in a two-agent setting. In this paper, we consider the problem of optimal allocation of akkk-partite quantum resource amongstnnnagents,k<nk < nk<n. We study the problem of decentralized estimation of a binary source by agents that are informed through independent binary symmetric channels, and face a cost that is homogeneous in their actions. We show akkk-partite quantum resource produces the maximum advantage over classical strategies when allocated to the agents with thekkkmost reliable channels.
The inability to communicate poses a major challenge to coordination in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Prior work has explored correlating local policies via shared randomness, sometimes in the form of a correlation device, as a mechanism to assist in decentralized decision-making. In contrast, this work introduces the first framework for training MARL agents to exploit shared quantum entanglement as a coordination resource, which permits a larger class of communication-free correlated policies than shared randomness alone. This is motivated by well-known results in quantum physics which posit that, for certain single-round cooperative games with no communication, shared quantum entanglement enables strategies that outperform those that only use shared randomness. In such cases, we say that there is quantum advantage. Our framework is based on a novel differentiable policy parameterization that enables optimization over quantum measurements, together with a novel policy architecture that decomposes joint policies into a quantum coordinator and decentralized local actors. To illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we first show that we can learn, purely from experience, strategies that attain quantum advantage in single-round games that are treated as black box oracles. We then demonstrate how our machinery can learn policies with quantum advantage in an illustrative multi-agent sequential decision-making problem formulated as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP).
Consider a decentralized partially-observed Markov decision problem (POMDP) with multiple cooperative agents aiming to maximize a long-term-average reward criterion. We observe that the availability, at a fixed rate, of entangled states of a product quantum system between the agents, where each agent has access to one of the component systems, can result in strictly improved performance even compared to the scenario where common randomness is provided to the agents, i.e. there is a quantum advantage in decentralized control. This observation comes from a simple reinterpretation of the conclusions of the well-known Mermin-Peres square, which underpins the Mermin-Peres game. While quantum advantage has been demonstrated earlier in one-shot team problems of this kind, it is notable that there are examples where there is a quantum advantage for the one-shot criterion but it disappears in the dynamical scenario. The presence of a quantum advantage in dynamical scenarios is thus seen to be a novel finding relative to the current state of knowledge about the achievable performance in decentralized control problems. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Pravin P. Varaiya.
Randomness appears both in classical stochastic physics and in quantum mechanics. A number of communication models and other information protocols entail sharing randomness among distant parties. Here we report a computational scenario of shared randomness processing where quantum sources manifest clear-cut precedence over the corresponding classical counterparts. The advantage is established in a resource theoretic set-up which we formalize in this work. The classical mutual information turns out to be a faithful resource quantifier of shared randomness although it does not sufficiently characterize all possible transitions among the resources. Quantum theory exhibits advantage in shared randomness processing in the sense that the set of resourceful states obtained under free operation from a bipartite quantum system is strictly larger than the set obtained from an analogous classical system. Interestingly, the quantum advantage can be manifested in the optimal payoff of a two players co-operative game -- the `non-monopolize social subsidy' game. We also show that the quantum states resulting to the desired advantage necessitates nonclassicality in the form of quantum discord. We then address the task of distributing shared randomness between two parties. Quite interestingly, it turns out that noisy quantum channel can exhibit advantage even when it has zero quantum capacity and classical capacity much less than the corresponding classical channel. The imperfect channel examples facilitates and welcomes experiment to achieve the reported quantum advantage with presently available quantum devices.
We examine the advantages that quantum strategies afford in communication-limited games. Inspired by the card game blackjack, we focus on cooperative, two-party sequential games in which a single classical bit of communication is allowed from the player who moves first to the player who moves second. Within this setting, we explore the usage of quantum entanglement between the players and find analytic and numerical conditions for quantum advantage over classical strategies. Using these conditions, we study a family of blackjack-type games with varying numbers of card types, and find a range of parameters where quantum advantage is achieved.