We establish exponential strong converse theorems for blind quantum data compression of finite-dimensional mixed-state sources, with and without entanglement assistance. Blind compression is a fundamental quantum information processing task in which the sender aims to transmit quantum states without direct access to the classical label. Strong converse is a notable aspect of data compression: the accuracy of the compression abruptly drops down to zero once the compression rate goes below a threshold. Strong converses for data compression have been established for pure-state sources; however, for mixed-state sources, the optimal compression rate is determined by a structural decomposition of quantum states and can change substantially under small perturbations. This sensitivity makes it difficult to quantitatively analyze the trade-off between compression rate and error. Despite recent progress, whether a strong converse holds at the optimal rate has remained unresolved in general. In this work, we resolve this question affirmatively. For unassisted compression, we show that at every rate below the optimum, the accuracy decays exponentially with the block length for general mixed-state sources without restrictions on protocols. We also prove exponential strong converse for blind compression with unlimited entanglement assistance at its optimal rate. Combining the two strong converse bounds yields exponential decay at every compression-entanglement rate pair outside the complete achievable rate region. Our proof introduces a new overlap quantity based on the structure of quantum states; this quantity connects preservation of the source information to the dimension of the transmitted system. We expect that this approach provides useful tools for converse analyses of other quantum information-processing tasks involving mixed states.
We establish exponential strong converse theorems for blind quantum data compression of finite-dimensional mixed-state sources, with and without entanglement assistance. Blind compression is a fundamental quantum information processing task in which the sender aims to transmit quantum states without direct access to the classical label. Strong converse is a notable aspect of data compression: the accuracy of the compression abruptly drops down to zero once the compression rate goes below a threshold. Strong converses for data compression have been established for pure-state sources; however, for mixed-state sources, the optimal compression rate is determined by a structural decomposition of quantum states and can change substantially under small perturbations. This sensitivity makes it difficult to quantitatively analyze the trade-off between compression rate and error. Despite recent progress, whether a strong converse holds at the optimal rate has remained unresolved in general. In this work, we resolve this question affirmatively. For unassisted compression, we show that at every rate below the optimum, the accuracy decays exponentially with the block length for general mixed-state sources without restrictions on protocols. We also prove exponential strong converse for blind compression with unlimited entanglement assistance at its optimal rate. Combining the two strong converse bounds yields exponential decay at every compression-entanglement rate pair outside the complete achievable rate region. Our proof introduces a new overlap quantity based on the structure of quantum states; this quantity connects preservation of the source information to the dimension of the transmitted system. We expect that this approach provides useful tools for converse analyses of other quantum information-processing tasks involving mixed states.
In this paper, we study strong converse properties for both visible and blind compression of mixed states. The optimal rate of a visible compression scheme is obtained in terms of the entanglement of purification, whose additivity remains unknown so far. For a variation of extendible states, we prove that the entanglement of purification is additive and apply this to obtain a "pretty strong" converse bound for the blind and visible compression of such states. Namely, when the rate decreases below the optimal rate, the error exhibits a discontinuous jump from 0 to at least 321. To deal with the visible case for general states, we define a new quantity Eα,p(A:R)ρ for a bipartite state ρAR and α∈(0,1)∪(1,∞) as the α-Rényi generalization of the entanglement of purification Ep(A:R)ρ. For α=1, we define E1,p(A:R)ρ:=Ep(A:R)ρ. We show that for any rate below the regularization limα→1+Eα,p∞(A:R)ρ:=limα→1+limn→∞nEα,p(An:Rn)ρ⊗n the fidelity for the visible compression exponentially converges to zero. Moreover, we consider blind compression of a general mixed-state source ρAR shared between an encoder and an inaccessible reference system R. We obtain a strong converse bound for the compression of this source by assuming that the decoder is a super-unital channel. This immediately implies a strong converse for the blind compression of ensembles of mixed states, by assuming a super-unital decoder, as this is a special case of the general mixed-state source ρAR where the reference system R has a classical structure.
We consider the most general finite-dimensional quantum mechanical information source, which is given by a quantum systemAthat is correlated with a reference systemR. The task is to compressAin such a way as to reproduce the joint source stateρARat the decoder with asymptotically high fidelity. This includes Schumacher’s original quantum source coding problem of a pure state ensemble and that of a single pure entangled state, as well as general mixed state ensembles. Here, we determine the optimal compression rate (in qubits per source system) in terms of the Koashi-Imoto decomposition of the source into a classical, a quantum, and a redundant part. The same decomposition yields the optimal rate in the presence of unlimited entanglement between compressor and decoder, and indeed the full region of feasible qubit-ebit rate pairs.
The quantum capacity of a noisy channel quantifies the maximum rate at which quantum information can be transmitted reliably. For general channels, its evaluation requires an optimization over arbitrarily many channel uses. Degradable channels form a central exception: their capacity is given by the single-letter coherent information, while antidegradable channels have zero capacity. Nevertheless, even for these fundamental classes, it has remained open whether communication above capacity becomes possible when a fixed non-maximal error is tolerated. Here we resolve this problem by proving an exponential strong converse for every finite-dimensional degradable and antidegradable channel: at any rate above capacity, the fidelity of every coding scheme decays exponentially with the number of channel uses. As an immediate consequence, we establish the first all-code exponential strong converse for the quantum erasure channel throughout its full parameter range, strengthening previous results that applied only to almost all codes. We also show that exponential strong-converse bounds are preserved under receiver post-processing. This yields efficiently computable semidefinite-programming bounds for arbitrary finite-dimensional channels, improved bounds for Pauli channels, and an exact exponential strong converse for a nondegradable multilevel amplitude-damping family.
We prove an exponential strong converse for the unassisted private capacity of every finite-dimensional degradable quantum channel. We use a single error criterion: the infidelity between the actual message-estimate-environment state and an ideal state consisting of uniformly distributed, perfectly correlated messages that are independent of the environment. At every rate strictly above the channel's maximum coherent information, the optimized fidelity to this ideal state decays exponentially in the number of channel uses. The same bound holds when the ideal environment state is fixed to the actual environment marginal. The proof applies to arbitrary mixed-state encoders and arbitrary collective decoders. Its main operator ingredient is an overlap bound for privacy tests: two receiver placements with a common subsystem of dimension dC have overlap at most dC/M, where M is the key size, independently of both shield dimensions. We combine this bound with the signed averaging construction presented in arXiv:2608.01308 and a single-filter reduction to symmetric states. A Gaussian filter replaces the common receiver subsystem by a system of controlled dimension from which the original correlations can be approximately recovered using quantum side information. The filter preserves exact exchange symmetry, and a uniform smooth-entropy estimate bounds its output dimension for arbitrary correlated channel inputs. We also obtain an exponential strong converse at zero for antidegradable channels under the same joint criterion and, consequently, for the private capacity of the quantum erasure channel throughout its parameter range.
This paper is concerned with quantum data compression of asymptotically many independent and identically distributed copies of ensembles of mixed quantum states. The encoder has access to a side information system. The figure of merit is per-copy or local error criterion. Rate-distortion theory studies the trade-off between the compression rate and the per-copy error. The optimal trade-off can be characterized by the rate-distortion function, which is the best rate given a certain distortion. In this paper, we derive the rate-distortion function of mixed-state compression. The rate-distortion functions in the entanglement-assisted and unassisted scenarios are in terms of a single-letter mutual information quantity and the regularized entanglement of purification, respectively. For the general setting where the consumption of both communication and entanglement are considered, we present the full qubit-entanglement rate region. Our compression scheme covers both blind and visible compression models (and other models in between) depending on the structure of the side information system.
A quantum channel can transmit quantum states, classical messages, or classical messages that remain secret from its environment. We prove exponential strong converses for all three tasks over arbitrary finite-dimensional memoryless quantum channels, at their respective regularized capacities and allowing arbitrary entangled inputs across channel uses and joint decoding. Above quantum or classical capacity, entanglement fidelity or decoding success probability, respectively, decays exponentially with the number of channel uses. Above private capacity, fidelity to an ideal shared secret key decays exponentially; in particular, vanishing secrecy error forces decoding success to vanish. The proofs combine one-shot quantum blowing-up lemmas, which convert codes with low success into reliable codes with a controlled loss in code size, with a low-degree polynomial approximation of the channel's Stinespring image projector. The loss is governed by the projective tensor norm of the approximation across the receiver--environment bipartition. For memoryless channels, the polynomial construction gives exponential accuracy while keeping the rate loss arbitrarily small, turning the corresponding weak converses into strong converses.