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arXiv:2507.06868

Properties of Random Code Ensembles over Classical-Quantum Channels

Giuseppe Cocco, J.R. Fonollosa

Published Jul 9, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

We show two properties of i.i.d. code ensembles over classical-quantum (CQ) channels with arbitrary output states. The first property is that the probability distribution of the error exponent across the ensemble accumulates above a threshold that is strictly larger than the CQ random coding exponent (RCE) at low rates, while coinciding with it at rates close to the mutual information of the channel. This result, combined with the works by Dalai, Renes, Li and Yang and Cheng and Liu, implies that the ensemble distribution of error exponents concentrates around the CQ RCE in the high rate regime. Moreover, in the same rate region the threshold we derive coincides with the ensemble-average of the exponent, that is, the CQ typical random coding (TRC) exponent. The second property we derive is that the probability that a randomly selected code from an ensemble contains a nested code of the same rate such that each of its codewords achieves the CQ expurgated exponent goes to one asymptotically in the codeword length. Such nested code can be obtained by expurgating a vanishingly small fraction of codewords as the codeword length increases. This result refines Holevo's work [5], which proved that the expurgated exponent can be achieved by discarding the worst half of the codewords from at least one code in the ensemble.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2507.06868

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We show two properties of i.i.d. code ensembles over classical-quantum (CQ) channels with arbitrary output states. The first property is that the probability distribution of the error exponent across the ensemble accumulates above a threshold that is strictly larger than the CQ random coding exponent (RCE) at low rates, while coinciding with it at rates close to the mutual information of the channel. This result, combined with the works by Dalai, Renes, Li and Yang and Cheng and Liu, implies that the ensemble distribution of error exponents concentrates around the CQ RCE in the high rate regime. Moreover, in the same rate region the threshold we derive coincides with the ensemble-average of the exponent, that is, the CQ typical random coding (TRC) exponent. The second property we derive is that the probability that a randomly selected code from an ensemble contains a nested code of the same rate such that each of its codewords achieves the CQ expurgated exponent goes to one asymptotically in the codeword length. Such nested code can be obtained by expurgating a vanishingly small fraction of codewords as the codeword length increases. This result refines Holevo's work [5], which proved that the expurgated exponent can be achieved by discarding the worst half of the codewords from at least one code in the ensemble.
We show that the probability distribution of the error exponent in i.i.d. code ensembles over classical-quantum (CQ) channels with arbitrary output states accumulates above a threshold that is strictly larger than the CQ random coding exponent (RCE) at low rates, while coinciding with it at rates close to the mutual information of the channel. This result, combined with the work by Dalai [1] and the recent ones by Renes [2] and Li and Yang [3], implies that the ensemble distribution of error exponents concentrates around the CQ RCE in the high rate regime. Moreover, in the same rate regime the threshold we derive coincides with the ensemble-average of the exponent, that is, the typical random coding (TRC) exponent [4].
A fundamental quantity of interest in Shannon theory, classical or quantum, is the error exponent of a given channel W and rate R: the constantE(W,R)E(W,R)E(W,R)which governs the exponential decay of decoding error when using ever larger optimal codes of fixed rate R to communicate over ever more (memoryless) instances of a given channel W. Nearly matching lower and upper bounds are well-known for classical channels. Here I show a lower bound on the error exponent of communication over arbitrary classical-quantum (CQ) channels which matches Dalai’s sphere-packing upper bound for rates above a critical value, exactly analogous to the case of classical channels. This proves a conjecture made by Holevo in his investigation of the problem. Unlike the classical case, however, the argument does not proceed via a refined analysis of a suitable decoder, but instead by leveraging a bound by Hayashi on the error exponent of the cryptographic task of privacy amplification. This bound is then related to the coding problem via tight entropic uncertainty relations and Gallager’s method of constructing capacity-achieving parity-check codes for arbitrary channels. Along the way, I find a lower bound on the error exponent of the task of compression of classical information relative to quantum side information that matches the sphere-packing upper bound of Cheng et al. In turn, the polynomial prefactors to the sphere-packing bound found by Cheng et al. may be translated to the privacy amplification problem, sharpening a recent result by Li, Yao, and Hayashi, at least for linear randomness extractors.
How well can we approximate a quantum channel output state using a random codebook with a certain size? In this work, we study the quantum soft covering problem. Namely, we use a random codebook with codewords independently sampled from a prior distribution and send it through a classical-quantum channel to approximate the target state. When using a random codebook sampled from an independent and identically distributed prior with a rate above the quantum mutual information, we show that the expected trace distance between the codebook-induced state and the target state decays with exponent given by the sandwiched Rényi information. On the other hand, when the rate of the codebook size is below the quantum mutual information, the trace distance converges to one exponentially fast. We obtain similar results when using a random constant composition codebook, whereas the sandwiched Augustin information expresses the error exponent. In addition to the above large deviation analysis, our results also hold in the moderate deviation regime. That is, we show that even when the rate of the codebook size approaches the quantum mutual information moderately quickly, the trace distance still vanishes asymptotically.
An important part of the information theory folklore had been about the output statistics of codes that achieve the capacity and how the empirical distributions compare to the output distributions induced by the optimal input in the channel capacity problem. Results for a variety of such empirical output distributions of good codes have been known in the literature, such as the comparison of the output distribution of the code to the optimal output distribution in vanishing and non-vanishing error probability cases. Motivated by these, we aim to achieve similar results for the quantum codes that are used for classical communication, that is the setting in which the classical messages are communicated through quantum codewords that pass through a noisy quantum channel. We first show the uniqueness of the optimal output distribution, to be able to talk more concretely about the optimal output distribution. Then, we extend the vanishing error probability results to the quantum case, by using techniques that are close in spirit to the classical case. We also extend non-vanishing error probability results to the quantum case on block codes, by using the second-order converses for such codes based on hypercontractivity results for the quantum generalized depolarizing semi-groups.
Abstract In this paper we carry out an in-depth study on the average decoding error probability of the random parity-check matrix ensemble over the erasure channel under three decoding principles, namely unambiguous decoding, maximum likelihood decoding and list decoding. We obtain explicit formulas for the average decoding error probabilities of the random parity-check matrix ensemble under these three decoding principles and compute the error exponents. Moreover, for unambiguous decoding, we compute the variance of the decoding error probability of the random parity-check matrix ensemble and the error exponent of the variance, which implies a strong concentration result, that is, roughly speaking, the ratio of the decoding error probability of a random linear code in the ensemble and the average decoding error probability of the ensemble converges to 1 with high probability when the code length goes to infinity.
A fundamental quantity of interest in Shannon theory, classical or quantum, is the optimal error exponent of a given channel W and rate R: the constant E(W,R) which governs the exponential decay of decoding error when using ever larger codes of fixed rate R to communicate over ever more (memoryless) instances of a given channel W. Here I show that a bound by Hayashi [CMP 333, 335 (2015)] for an analogous quantity in privacy amplification implies a lower bound on the error exponent of communication over symmetric classical-quantum channels. The resulting bound matches Dalai’s [IEEE TIT 59, 8027 (2013)] sphere-packing upper bound for rates above a critical value, and reproduces the well-known classical result for symmetric channels. The argument proceeds by first relating the error exponent of privacy amplification to that of compression of classical information with quantum side information, which gives a lower bound that matches the sphere-packing upper bound of Cheng et al. [IEEE TIT 67, 902 (2021)]. In turn, the polynomial prefactors to the sphere-packing bound found by Cheng et al. may be translated to the privacy amplification problem, sharpening a recent result by Li, Yao, and Hayashi [arXiv:2111.01075 [quant-ph]], at least for linear randomness extractors.