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Stochastics

On quantum versions of the classical Wasserstein distance

Julián Agredo, Franco Fagnola

Published Jan 3, 2017• 18 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We investigate a definition of quantum Wasserstein distance of two states based on their couplings on the product algebra as in the classical case. A detailed analysis of the two qubit model leads to a formal definition fulfilling some minimal requirements. It also shows that a clear-cut definition, by direct generalization of the classical one, is not achievable.

DOI
10.1080/17442508.2016.1276914

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We investigate a definition of quantum Wasserstein distance of two states based on their couplings on the product algebra as in the classical case. A detailed analysis of the two qubit model leads to a formal definition fulfilling some minimal requirements. It also shows that a clear-cut definition, by direct generalization of the classical one, is not achievable.
We propose a generalization of the Wasserstein distance of order 1 to the quantum states of n qudits. The proposal recovers the Hamming distance for the vectors of the canonical basis, and more generally the classical Wasserstein distance for quantum states diagonal in the canonical basis. The proposed distance is invariant with respect to permutations of the qudits and unitary operations acting on one qudit and is additive with respect to the tensor product. Our main result is a continuity bound for the von Neumann entropy with respect to the proposed distance, which significantly strengthens the best continuity bound with respect to the trace distance. We also propose a generalization of the Lipschitz constant to quantum observables. The notion of quantum Lipschitz constant allows us to compute the proposed distance with a semidefinite program. We prove a quantum version of Marton's transportation inequality and a quantum Gaussian concentration inequality for the spectrum of quantum Lipschitz observables. Moreover, we derive bounds on the contraction coefficients of shallow quantum circuits and of the tensor product of one-qudit quantum channels with respect to the proposed distance. We discuss other possible applications in quantum machine learning, quantum Shannon theory, and quantum many-body systems.
Optimal transport between classical probability distributions has been proven useful in areas such as machine learning and random combinatorial optimization. Quantum optimal transport, and the quantum Wasserstein distance as the minimal cost associated with transforming one quantum state to another, is expected to have implications in quantum state discrimination and quantum metrology. In this work, following the formalism introduced in [De Palma, G. and Trevisan, D. Ann. Henri Poincaré, {\bf 22} (2021), 3199-3234] to compute the optimal transport plan between two quantum states, we give a general formula for the Wasserstein distance of order 2 between any two one-mode Gaussian states. We discuss how the Wasserstein distance between classical Gaussian distributions and the quantum Wasserstein distance by De Palma and Trevisan for thermal states can be recovered from our general formula for Gaussian states. This opens the path to directly compare various known distance measures with the Wasserstein distance through their closed-form solutions.
We consider several definitions of the quantum Wasserstein distance based on an optimization over general bipartite quantum states with given marginals. Then, we examine the quantities obtained after the optimization is carried out over bipartite separable states instead. We prove that several of these quantities are equal to each other. Thus, we connect several approaches in the literature. We prove the triangle inequality for some of these quantities for the case of one of the three states being pure. As a byproduct, we show that the square root of the Uhlmann-Jozsa quantum fidelity can also be written as an optimization over separable states with given marginals. We use this to prove that some of these quantities equal the Uhlmann-Jozsa quantum fidelity for qubits. We also find relations with the superfidelity.
The quantum Wasserstein distances defined by Golse, Mouhot, Paul, and Caglioti and by De Palma and Trevisan coincide for qubits when a single operator appears in the cost function. As a consequence, the square of the self-distance equals the Wigner-Yanase skew information in this case. Moreover, for finite-dimensional systems of dimension d≥2d\ge2d≥2 and any number of operators, we show that the Golse-Mouhot-Paul-Caglioti self-distance is bounded from below by the De Palma-Trevisan self-distance.
We propose a generalization of the Wasserstein distance of order 1 to the quantum states of n qudits. The proposal recovers the Hamming distance for the vectors of the canonical basis, and more generally the classical Wasserstein distance for quantum states diagonal in the canonical basis. The proposed distance is invariant with respect to permutations of the qudits and unitary operations acting on one qudit and is additive with respect to the tensor product. Our main result is a continuity bound for the von Neumann entropy with respect to the proposed distance, which significantly strengthens the best continuity bound with respect to the trace distance. We also propose a generalization of the Lipschitz constant to quantum observables. The notion of quantum Lipschitz constant allows us to compute the proposed distance with a semidefinite program. We prove a quantum version of Marton's transportation inequality and a quantum Gaussian concentration inequality for the spectrum of quantum Lipschitz observables. Moreover, we derive bounds on the contraction coefficients of shallow quantum circuits and of the tensor product of one-qudit quantum channels with respect to the proposed distance. We discuss other possible applications in quantum machine learning, quantum Shannon theory, and quantum many-body systems.
We define the quantum Wasserstein distance such that the optimization of the coupling is carried out over bipartite separable states rather than bipartite quantum states in general, and examine its properties. Surprisingly, we find that the self-distance is related to the quantum Fisher information. We present a transport map corresponding to an optimal bipartite separable state. We discuss how the quantum Wasserstein distance introduced is connected to criteria detecting quantum entanglement. We define variance-like quantities that can be obtained from the quantum Wasserstein distance by replacing the minimization over quantum states by a maximization. We extend our results to a family of generalized quantum Fisher information quantities.