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arXiv:2606.27442

A Quantum Method of Types

Arick Grootveld

cs.ITquant-phSubmitted Jun 25, 2026• Announced Jun 29, 2026• 0 citations
v1 · Jun 25, 2026v2 · Jun 30, 2026v3 · Sep 1, 2026
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Abstract

The method of types is a fundamental tool in classical information theory, with applications ranging from composite hypothesis testing and universal source coding to the capacity of arbitrarily varying channels. In this work we introduce an empirical operator acting as a quantum analog of the empirical distribution. We show that this empirical operator satisfies combinatorial and large-deviation bounds, which in combination describe a quantum method of types. As an application, we use this quantum method of types to prove a universal achievability result for composite quantum hypothesis testing.

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The method of types is a fundamental tool in classical information theory, with applications ranging from composite hypothesis testing and universal source coding to the capacity of arbitrarily varying channels. In this work we introduce an empirical operator acting as a quantum analog of the empirical distribution. We show that this empirical operator satisfies combinatorial and large-deviation bounds, which in combination describe a quantum method of types. As an application, we use this quantum method of types to prove a universal achievability result for composite quantum hypothesis testing.
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We determine the capacity of compound classical-quantum channels. As a consequence, we obtain the capacity formula for the averaged classical-quantum channels. The capacity result for compound channels demonstrates, as in the classical setting, the existence of reliable universal classical-quantum codes in scenarios where the onlya prioriinformation about the channel used for the transmission of information is that it belongs to a given set of memoryless classical-quantum channels. Our approach is based on a universal classical approximation of the quantum relative entropy which in turn relies on a universal hypothesis testing result.
We determine the capacity of compound classical-quantum channels. As a consequence we obtain the capacity formula for the averaged classical-quantum channels. The capacity result for compound channels demonstrates, as in the classical setting, the existence of reliable universal classical-quantum codes in scenarios where the only a priori information about the channel used for the transmission of information is that it belongs to a given set of memoryless classical-quantum channels. Our approach is based on the universal classical approximation of the quantum relative entropy which in turn relies on the universal hypothesis testing results.
Quantum hypothesis testing (QHT) concerns the statistical inference of unknown quantum states. In the general setting of composite hypotheses, the goal of QHT is to determine whether an unknown quantum state belongs to one or another of two classes of states based on the measurement of a number of copies of the state. Prior art on QHT with composite hypotheses focused on a fixed-copy two-step protocol, with state estimation followed by an optimized joint measurement. However, this fixed-copy approach may be inefficient, using the same number of copies irrespective of the inherent difficulty of the testing task. To address these limitations, we introduce the quantum sequential universal test (QSUT), a novel framework for sequential QHT in the general case of composite hypotheses. QSUT builds on universal inference, and it alternates between adaptive local measurements aimed at exploring the hypothesis space and joint measurements optimized for maximal discrimination. QSUT is proven to rigorously control the type I error under minimal assumptions about the hypothesis structure. We present two practical instantiations of QSUT, one based on the Helstrom-Holevo test and one leveraging shallow variational quantum circuits. Empirical results across a range of composite QHT tasks demonstrate that QSUT consistently reduces copy complexity relative to state-of-the-art fixed-copy strategies.
We present our recent results on limit theorems for quantum entropies and their applications in quantum information theory. They include the full extensions of the fundamental asymptotic equipartition property (AEP) to ergodic quantum informations sources and the ergodic version of Stein's Lemma on quantum hypothesis testing. These limit theorems are then used to obtain a data compression theorem for ergodic quantum sources and a quantum version of Sanov's theorem on large deviations for uncorrelated quantum sources. Moreover, Stein's lemma clearifies the operational interpretation of the quantum Kullback-Leibler distance (relative entropy), and this operational understanding of this quantity can be employed to give a new intuitive proof of the monotonicity of this statistical distance measure relying on information-theoretic methods.