Contraction coefficients quantify the loss of distinguishability induced by a channel and provide a strong form of the data-processing inequality. While standard contraction coefficients ignore auxiliary quantum systems, existing extensions based on complete contraction coefficients require the compared states to have identical reference marginals. In this work, we introduce conditional contraction coefficients, a novel family that incorporates arbitrary quantum reference systems by subtracting the distinguishability already present in the reference system. We develop a general framework for contraction coefficients with such quantum side information, including the corresponding strong-data-processing-inequality (SDPI) constants, expansion coefficients, and relative contraction coefficients. For the trace distance, we show that the optimization can be restricted to orthogonal input states. For the quantum relative entropy, we prove that its conditional contraction coefficient is exactly equal to the contraction coefficient of the conditional mutual information, extending the classical correspondence between relative-entropy contraction and mutual-information contraction to the setting with quantum side information. More generally, we identify structural properties of divergences required for these results and discuss extensions beyond the relative entropy. These results establish a unified framework for analyzing information contraction in quantum network settings, where quantum side information and distributed correlations are intrinsic features of the information-processing task. Applications include an extension of the Polyanskiy-Wu bounds on mutual information contraction, new perspectives on mixing times, and fundamental limits on quantum memories.
Contraction coefficients quantify the loss of distinguishability induced by a channel and provide a strong form of the data-processing inequality. While standard contraction coefficients ignore auxiliary quantum systems, existing extensions based on complete contraction coefficients require the compared states to have identical reference marginals. In this work, we introduce conditional contraction coefficients, a novel family that incorporates arbitrary quantum reference systems by subtracting the distinguishability already present in the reference system. We develop a general framework for contraction coefficients with such quantum side information, including the corresponding strong-data-processing-inequality (SDPI) constants, expansion coefficients, and relative contraction coefficients. For the trace distance, we show that the optimization can be restricted to orthogonal input states. For the quantum relative entropy, we prove that its conditional contraction coefficient is exactly equal to the contraction coefficient of the conditional mutual information, extending the classical correspondence between relative-entropy contraction and mutual-information contraction to the setting with quantum side information. More generally, we identify structural properties of divergences required for these results and discuss extensions beyond the relative entropy. These results establish a unified framework for analyzing information contraction in quantum network settings, where quantum side information and distributed correlations are intrinsic features of the information-processing task. Applications include an extension of the Polyanskiy-Wu bounds on mutual information contraction, new perspectives on mixing times, and fundamental limits on quantum memories.
The maximal correlation coefficient measures the linear correlation in a bipartite distribution and contraction coefficients measure how much information is lost under a noisy channel. Remarkably, Raginsky established a close relation between these two concepts by showing that the χ2 contraction coefficient equals the maximal correlation coefficient of the joint input/output distribution of the channel. In quantum theory, several generalizations of these concepts have been proposed, but none recover all the classical properties. Here we construct a framework in which the classical theory extends to the quantum setting. We introduce families of quantum maximal correlation coefficients and show that many impose limits on converting quantum states under local operations. We establish a family of quantum contraction coefficients are efficiently computable, yielding a generic efficient algorithm for mixing times of quantum channels with a full rank fixed point. Furthermore, we establish a quantum analogue of Raginsky's classical correspondence that relates these two families of quantities. To do this, we develop the operator-theoretic approach to Petz's family of non-commutative L2(p) spaces that extend the data processing inequality for variance to quantum theory.
The data-processing inequality ensures quantum channels reduce state distinguishability, with contraction coefficients quantifying optimal bounds. However, these can be overly optimistic and not representative of the usual behavior. We study how noise contracts distinguishability of `typical' states, beyond the worst-case. To that end, we introduce and study a family of moments of contraction for quantum divergences, which interpolate between the worst-case contraction coefficient of a channel and its average behavior under a chosen ensemble of input states. We establish general properties of these moments, relate moments for different divergences, and derive bounds in terms of channel parameters like the entropy or purity of its Choi state. Focusing on the trace distance, we obtain upper and lower bounds on its average contraction under tensor-product noise channels, and prove that, depending on the local noise strength, there is a phase transition in the limit of many channel uses: below a critical error rate the average contraction remains near unity, whereas above it decays exponentially with system size. We extend these phase-transition phenomena to random quantum circuits with unital noise, showing that constant-depth noisy circuits do not shrink the trace distance on average, even when given highly entangled states as input. In contrast, even at loglogn depth, the average trace distance can become superpolynomially small. Finally, we explore moments of contraction for f-divergences and discuss applications to local differential privacy, demonstrating that noise regimes ensuring privacy can render outputs essentially indistinguishable on average. Thus, our results provide a fine-grained framework to quantify typical channel noise in quantum information and computation and unveil new phenomena in contraction coefficients, such as phase transitions for average contraction.
The data processing inequality is the most basic requirement for any meaningful measure of information. It essentially states that distinguishability measures between states decrease if we apply a quantum channel and is the centerpiece of many results in information theory. Moreover, it justifies the operational interpretation of most entropic quantities. In this work, we revisit the notion of contraction coefficients of quantum channels, which provide sharper and specialized versions of the data processing inequality. A concept closely related to data processing is partial orders on quantum channels. First, we discuss several quantum extensions of the well-known less noisy ordering and relate them to contraction coefficients. We further define approximate versions of the partial orders and show how they can give strengthened and conceptually simple proofs of several results on approximating capacities. Moreover, we investigate the relation to other partial orders in the literature and their properties, particularly with regard to tensorization. We then examine the relation between contraction coefficients with other properties of quantum channels such as hypercontractivity. Next, we extend the framework of contraction coefficients to general f-divergences and prove several structural results. Finally, we consider two important classes of quantum channels, namely Weyl-covariant and bosonic Gaussian channels. For those, we determine new contraction coefficients and relations for various partial orders.
A quantum generalized divergence by definition satisfies the data-processing inequality; as such, the relative decrease in such a divergence under the action of a quantum channel is at most one. This relative decrease is formally known as the contraction coefficient of the channel and the divergence. Interestingly, there exist combinations of channels and divergences for which the contraction coefficient is strictly less than one. Furthermore, understanding the contraction coefficient is fundamental for the study of statistical tasks under privacy constraints. To this end, here we establish upper bounds on contraction coefficients for the hockey-stick divergence under privacy constraints, where privacy is quantified with respect to the quantum local differential privacy (QLDP) framework, and we fully characterize the contraction coefficient for the trace distance under privacy constraints. Using the machinery developed, we also determine an upper bound on the contraction of both the Bures distance and quantum relative entropy relative to the normalized trace distance, under QLDP constraints. Next, we apply our findings to establish bounds on the sample complexity of quantum hypothesis testing under privacy constraints. Furthermore, we study various scenarios in which the sample complexity bounds are tight while providing order-optimal quantum channels that achieve those bounds. Lastly, we show how private quantum channels provide fairness and Holevo information stability in quantum learning settings.
We establish upper and lower bounds for relative entropy contraction of generalized quantum depolarizing channels and semigroups. Our bound provides tight first order asymptotic of the contraction rate in terms of the dimension constant. One side estimate are based on sharp reverse ratio and convexity of relative entropy of two states, which can be derived from the recently introduced Hockey-Stick quantum f-divergence, and also independently, Bogoliubov--Kubo--Mori quantum Fisher information metric. The other side follows from the existence of index achieving pure state with respect to a general conditional expectation. Our results extend to the complete entropy contraction rate, tensor stable estimates for product dynamics. Examples include quantum depolarization, dephasing, and compact group symmetrization, with consequences for the decay rate of coherence and asymmetry.
In classical information theory, the Doeblin coefficient of a classical channel provides an efficiently computable upper bound on the total-variation contraction coefficient of the channel, leading to what is known as a strong data-processing inequality. Here, we investigate quantum Doeblin coefficients as a generalization of the classical concept. In particular, we define various new quantum Doeblin coefficients, one of which has several desirable properties, including concatenation and multiplicativity, in addition to being efficiently computable. We also develop various interpretations of two of the quantum Doeblin coefficients, including representations as minimal singlet fractions, exclusion values, reverse max-mutual and oveloH informations, reverse robustnesses, and hypothesis testing reverse mutual and oveloH informations. Our interpretations of quantum Doeblin coefficients as either entanglement-assisted or unassisted exclusion values are particularly appealing, indicating that they are proportional to the best possible error probabilities one could achieve in state-exclusion tasks by making use of the channel. We also outline various applications of quantum Doeblin coefficients, ranging from limitations on quantum machine learning algorithms that use parameterized quantum circuits (noise-induced barren plateaus), on error mitigation protocols, on the sample complexity of noisy quantum hypothesis testing, on the fairness of noisy quantum models, and on mixing, indistinguishability, and decoupling times of time-varying channels. All of these applications make use of the fact that quantum Doeblin coefficients appear in upper bounds on various trace-distance contraction coefficients of a quantum channel. Furthermore, in all of these applications, our analysis using quantum Doeblin coefficients provides improvements of various kinds over contributions from prior literature, both in terms of generality and being efficiently computable.