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arXiv:2607.27015

Reliability Functions of Quantum Soft Covering and Privacy Amplification via a Mixed-Order Rényi Divergence

Shi-Bing Li, Hongsen Qiu, Xinyu Zhang

quant-phcs.ITmath.FASubmitted Jul 29, 2026• Announced Jul 30, 2026• 0 citations
v1 · Jul 29, 2026v2 · Aug 12, 2026
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Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a novel mixed-order Rényi divergence and investigate its fundamental properties. Using this divergence, we define a family of mixed-order order-two Rényi mutual information and Rényi conditional entropy. We derive exact reliability functions of quantum soft covering and privacy amplification under the sandwiched Rényi divergence with order $α\in[2,\infty)$. The former is jointly characterized by the sandwiched and mixed-order order-two Rényi mutual information quantities, while the latter is characterized by the corresponding conditional entropies. These results provide operational interpretations of the proposed mixed-order Rényi divergence. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first exact characterization of the reliability function for quantum soft covering.

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In this paper, we introduce a novel mixed-order Rényi divergence and investigate its fundamental properties. Using this divergence, we define a family of mixed-order order-two Rényi mutual information and Rényi conditional entropy. We derive exact reliability functions of quantum soft covering and privacy amplification under the sandwiched Rényi divergence with order α∈[2,∞)α\in[2,\infty)α∈[2,∞). The former is jointly characterized by the sandwiched and mixed-order order-two Rényi mutual information quantities, while the latter is characterized by the corresponding conditional entropies. These results provide operational interpretations of the proposed mixed-order Rényi divergence. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first exact characterization of the reliability function for quantum soft covering.
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).
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We investigate quantum Rényi entropic quantities, specifically those derived from 'sandwiched' divergence. This divergence is one of several proposed Rényi generalisations of the quantum relative entropy. We may define Rényi generalisations of the quantum conditional entropy and mutual information in terms of this divergence, from which they inherit many desirable properties. However, these quantities lack some of the convenient structure of their Shannon and von Neumann counterparts. We attempt to bridge this gap by establishing divergence inequalities for valid combinations of Rényi order which replicate the chain and decomposition rules of Shannon and von Neumann entropies. Although weaker in general, these inequalities recover equivalence when the Rényi parameters tend to one. To this end we present Rényi mutual information decomposition rules, a new approach to the Rényi conditional entropy tripartite chain rules and a more general bipartite comparison. The derivation of these results relies on a novel complex interpolation approach for general spaces of linear operators. These new comparisons allow us to employ techniques that until now were only available for Shannon and von Neumann entropies. We can therefore directly apply them to the derivation of Rényi entropic uncertainty relations. Accordingly, we establish a family of Rényi information exclusion relations and provide further generalisations and improvements to this and other known relations, including the Rényi bipartite uncertainty relations.
We study quantum soft covering and privacy amplification against quantum side information. The former task aims to approximate a quantum state by sampling from a prior distribution and querying a quantum channel. The latter task aims to extract uniform and independent randomness against quantum adversaries. For both tasks, we use trace distance to measure the closeness between the processed state and the ideal target state. We show that the minimal amount of samples for achieving an ε-covering is given by the (1 − ε)-hypothesis testing information (with additional logarithmic additive terms), while the maximal extractable randomness for an ε-secret extractor is characterized by the conditional (1 − ε)-hypothesis testing entropy. When performing independent and identical repetitions of the tasks, our one-shot characterizations lead to tight asymptotic expansions of the above-mentioned operational quantities. We establish their second-order rates given by the quantum mutual information variance and the quantum conditional information variance, respectively. Moreover, our results extend to the moderate deviation regime, which are the optimal asymptotic rates when the trace distances vanish at sub-exponential speed. Our proof technique is direct analysis of trace distance without smoothing.
Quantum information decoupling is an important quantum information processing task, which has found broad applications. In this paper, we characterize the performance of catalytic quantum information decoupling regarding the exponential rate under which perfect decoupling is approached, namely, the reliability function. We have obtained the exact formula when the decoupling cost is not larger than a critical value. In the situation of high cost, we provide upper and lower bounds. This result is then applied to quantum state merging and correlation erasure, exploiting their connection to decoupling. As technical tools, we derive the exponents for smoothing the conditional min-entropy and max-information, and we prove a novel bound for the convex-split lemma. Our results are given in terms of the sandwiched Renyi divergence, providing it with operational meanings in characterizing how fast the performance of quantum information tasks approach the perfect.
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