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arXiv:2601.19182 · IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

The strong converse exponent of composable randomness extraction against quantum side information

Roberto Rubboli, Marco Tomamichel

quant-phSubmitted Jan 27, 2026• Announced Jan 28, 2026• 0 citations
v1 · Jan 27, 2026v2 · Sep 26, 2026
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Abstract

We find a tight characterization of the strong converse exponent for randomness extraction against quantum side information. In contrast to previous tight bounds, we employ a composable error criterion given by the fidelity (or purified distance) to a uniform distribution in product with the marginal state. The characterization is in terms of a club-sandwiched conditional entropy recently introduced by Rubboli, Goodarzi and Tomamichel and used by Li, Li and Yu to establish the strong converse exponent for the case of classical side information. This provides the first precise operational interpretation of this family of conditional entropies in the quantum setting.

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We find a tight characterization of the strong converse exponent for randomness extraction against quantum side information. In contrast to previous tight bounds, we employ a composable error criterion given by the fidelity (or purified distance) to a uniform distribution in product with the marginal state. The characterization is in terms of a club-sandwiched conditional entropy recently introduced by Rubboli, Goodarzi and Tomamichel and used by Li, Li and Yu to establish the strong converse exponent for the case of classical side information. This provides the first precise operational interpretation of this family of conditional entropies in the quantum setting.
We determine the exact strong converse exponent of quantum soft covering under the sandwiched R{é}nyi divergence for all orders α∈[12,∞)α\in[\frac{1}{2},\infty)α∈[21​,∞). For α∈[12,1)α\in[\frac{1}{2},1)α∈[21​,1), the exponent is characterized by the two-parameter club-sandwiched mutual information, whereas for α∈[1,∞)α\in[1,\infty)α∈[1,∞), it is characterized by the order-ααα sandwiched R{é}nyi mutual information. We also determine the exact strong converse exponent of privacy amplification against quantum side information under the sandwiched R{é}nyi divergence for α∈(2,∞)α\in(2,\infty)α∈(2,∞), expressed in terms of the corresponding order-ααα sandwiched R{é}nyi conditional entropy. To the best of our knowledge, these results provide the first exact characterization of the strong converse exponent of quantum soft covering and the first precise operational interpretation of the two-parameter club-sandwiched mutual information in the quantum setting. The key ingredient is that we establish the exponential rate of the KKK-functional, which is instrumental in deriving the strong converse exponent of quantum soft covering for α∈[12,1)α\in[\frac{1}{2},1)α∈[21​,1).
We determine the strong converse exponent for the entanglement cost of quantum state merging, showing that it is characterized by the optimized ααα-zzz conditional Rényi entropies with z=α/2∈[1/2,1]z=α/2\in[1/2,1]z=α/2∈[1/2,1]. This contrasts with the sandwiched conditional Rényi entropies that typically govern strong converse exponents in quantum information theory. As a consequence, we derive the strong converse exponent of the partially smoothed conditional min-entropy in purified distance. This exponent is governed by club-sandwiched conditional entropies, whereas global smoothing leads to a sandwiched expression.
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We establish a one-shot strong converse bound for privacy amplification against quantum side information with trace distance as a security criterion. Firstly, our result shows that the trace distance converges to 1 exponentially fast for any finite blocklength when the rate of the extractable randomness exceeds the conditional von Neumann entropy of Alice given Eavesdropper. Secondly, we obtain a second-order converse bound for the maximal extractable randomness. Thirdly, our result extends to the moderate deviation regime. Namely, when the rate of the extractable randomness approaches the conditional von Neumann entropy from above with speed slower than O(1/nO\left( {1/\sqrt n } \right.O(1/n​, the trace distance still converges to 1 asymptotically. Lastly, our result yields strong converse to entropy accumulation, which complements the recent result by Dupuis [arXiv:2105.05342]. The full manuscript can be assessed in [1], [2].
This paper is eligible for the Jack Keil Wolf ISIT Student Paper Award.The smooth max-relative entropy is a basic tool in quantum information theory and cryptography. In this paper, we derive the exact exponent for the decay of the small modification of the quantum state in smoothing the max-relative entropy. We then apply this result to the problem of privacy amplification against quantum side information and obtain an upper bound for the exponent of the decreasing of the insecurity, measured using either purified distance or relative entropy. Our upper bound complements the earlier lower bound established by Hayashi, and the two bounds match when the rate of randomness extraction is above a critical value. Thus, for the case of high rate, we have determined the exact security exponent. Following this, we give examples and show that in the low-rate case, neither the upper bound nor the lower bound is tight in general.Lastly, we investigate the asymptotics of equivocation and its exponent under the security measure using the sandwiched Rényi divergence of order between 1 and 2, which has not been addressed previously in the quantum setting.
Quantum information decoupling is a fundamental primitive in quantum information theory, underlying various applications in quantum physics. We prove a novel one-shot decoupling theorem formulated in terms of quantum relative entropy distance, with the decoupling error bounded by two sandwiched Rényi conditional entropies. In the asymptotic i.i.d. setting of standard information decoupling via partial trace, we show that this bound is ensemble-tight in quantum relative entropy distance and thereby yields a characterization of the associated decoupling error exponent in the low-cost-rate regime. Leveraging this framework, we derive several operational applications formulated in terms of purified distance: (i) single-letter expressions for the exact error exponents of quantum state merging in the low-entanglement-cost and high-entanglement-distillation-rate regimes, in terms of Petz-Rényi conditional entropies, and (ii) regularized expressions for achievable error exponents of entanglement distillation and quantum channel coding in terms of Petz-Rényi coherent informations. We further prove that these achievable bounds are tight for maximally correlated states and generalized dephasing channels, respectively, for the high distillation-rate/coding-rate regimes.