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A one-shot quantum joint typicality lemma.

Pranab Kumar Sen

Published Jun 19, 2018• 15 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

A fundamental tool to prove inner bounds in classical network information theory is the so-called `conditional joint typicality lemma'. In addition to the lemma, one often uses unions and intersections of typical sets in the inner bound arguments without so much as giving them a second thought. These arguments fail spectacularly in the quantum setting. This bottleneck shows up in the fact that so-called `simultaneous decoders', as opposed to `successive cancellation decoders', are known for very few channels in quantum network information theory. Another manifestation of this bottleneck is the lack of so-called `simutaneous smoothing' theorems for quantum states. In this paper, we overcome the bottleneck by proving for the first time a one-shot quantum joint typicality lemma with robust union and intersection properties. To do so, we develop two novel tools in quantum information theory which may be of independent interest. The first tool is a simple geometric idea called `tilting', which increases the angles between a family of subspaces in orthogonal directions. The second tool, called `smoothing', is a way of perturbing a multipartite quantum state such that the partial trace over any subset of registers does not increase the operator norm by much. Our joint typicality lemma allows us to construct simultaneous quantum decoders for many multiterminal quantum channels. It provides a powerful tool to extend many results in classical network information theory to the one-shot quantum setting.

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A fundamental tool to prove inner bounds in classical network information theory is the so-called conditional joint typicality lemma'. In addition to the lemma, one often uses unions and intersections of typical sets in the inner bound arguments without so much as giving them a second thought. These arguments fail spectacularly in the quantum setting. This bottleneck shows up in the fact that so-called simultaneous decoders', as opposed to successive cancellation decoders', are known for very few channels in quantum network information theory. Another manifestation of this bottleneck is the lack of so-called simutaneous smoothing' theorems for quantum states.
In this paper, we overcome the bottleneck by proving for the first time a one-shot quantum joint typicality lemma with robust union and intersection properties. To do so, we develop two novel tools in quantum information theory which may be of independent interest. The first tool is a simple geometric idea called tilting', which increases the angles between a family of subspaces in orthogonal directions. The second tool, called smoothing', is a way of perturbing a multipartite quantum state such that the partial trace over any subset of registers does not increase the operator norm by much.
Our joint typicality lemma allows us to construct simultaneous quantum decoders for many multiterminal quantum channels. It provides a powerful tool to extend many results in classical network information theory to the one-shot quantum setting.
We provide a powerful machinery to prove fully smooth one shot multipartite covering, aka convex split, type results for quantum states. In the important case of smooth multipartite convex split for classical quantum states, aka smooth multipartite soft covering, our machinery works even when certain marginals of these states do not satisfy pairwise independence. The recent paper (arXiv:2410.17893) gave the first proof of fully smooth multipartite convex split by simplifying and extending a technique called telescoping, developed originally for convex split by (arXiv:2304.12056). However, that work as well as all earlier works on convex split assumed pairwise or even more independence amongst suitable marginals of the quantum states. We develop our machinery by leveraging known results from (arXiv:1806.07278) involving tilting and augmentation smoothing of quantum states, combined with a novel observation that a natural quantum operation `flattening' quantum states actually preserves the fidelity. This machinery is powerful enough to lead to non pairwise independent results as mentioned above. As an application of our soft covering lemma without pairwise independence, we prove the `natural' one shot inner bounds for sending private classical information over a quantum wiretap interference channel, even when the classical encoders at the input lose pairwise independence in their encoding strategies to a certain extent. This result was unknown earlier even in the classical setting.
We prove fully smooth one shot multipartite covering, aka convex split, results as well as fully smooth multipartite decoupling results for quantum states. Fully smooth one shot results for these problems were not known earlier, though the works of Cheng, Gao and Berta (arXiv:2304.12056) for convex split, and Colomer and Winter (arXiv:2304.12114) for decoupling, had made substantial progress by introducing a technique called telescoping cum mean zero decomposition of quantum states. We show that the telescoping cum mean zero decomposition technique can in fact be simplified and further extended in order to prove fully smooth decoupling and convex split results. Our techniques allow us to prove the first fully smooth one shot inner bounds for various fundamental network quantum information theory problems like e.g. the generalised Slepian Wolf problem of Anshu, Jain and Warsi (arXiv:1703.09961). We can also prove for the first time the natural polyhedral inner bound for sending quantum information over a quantum multiple access channel with limited entanglement assistance, first conjectured in Chakraborty, Nema and Sen (arXiv::2102.02187).
We consider the one-shot coding of multiple access channels one-time pad. Suppose that the senders and the receiver share an entangled state in the multi-party systems. Using the position-based coding, each sender encodes the classical messages on their systems, then they transmit their systems over the ideal quantum channels. The receiver applies a decoding operator to all the systems in order to figure out which message was transmitted with respect to the quantum joint typicality lemma. We provide the upper bound of the information leakage by the convex split lemma. Combining quantum max-information with quantum hypothesis testing mutual information, we give the inner bound of the achievable rate.
We introduce an improved one-shot characterisation of randomness extraction against quantum side information (privacy amplification), strengthening known one-shot bounds and providing a unified derivation of the tightest known asymptotic constraints. Our main tool is a new class of smooth conditional entropies defined by lifting classical smooth divergences through measurements. A key role is played by the measured smooth Rényi relative entropy of order 2, which we show to admit an equivalent variational form: it can be understood as allowing for smoothing over not only states, but also non-positive Hermitian operators. Building on this, we establish a tightened leftover hash lemma, significantly improving over all known smooth min-entropy bounds on extractable randomness and recovering the sharpest classical achievability results. We extend these methods to decoupling, the coherent analogue of privacy amplification, obtaining a corresponding improved one-shot bound. Relaxing our smooth entropy bounds leads to one-shot achievability results in terms of measured Rényi divergences, tightening the bounds of [Dupuis, arXiv:2105.05342] and recovering state-of-the-art asymptotic i.i.d. error exponents. We show an approximate optimality of our results by giving a matching one-shot converse bound up to additive logarithmic terms. This yields an optimal second-order asymptotic expansion of privacy amplification under trace distance, establishing a significantly tighter one-shot achievability result than previously shown in [Shen et al., arXiv:2202.11590] and proving its optimality for all hash functions.
In the context of network information theory, one often needs a multiparty probability distribution to be typical in several ways simultaneously. When considering quantum states instead of classical ones, it is in general difficult to prove the existence of a state that is jointly typical. Such a difficulty was recently emphasized and conjectures on the existence of such states were formulated. In this paper, we consider a one-shot multiparty typicality conjecture. The question can then be stated easily: is it possible to smooth the largest eigenvalues of all the marginals of a multipartite state ρ simultaneously while staying close to ρ? We prove the answer is yes whenever the marginals of the state commute. In the general quantum case, we prove that simultaneous smoothing is possible if the number of parties is two or more generally if the marginals to optimize satisfy some non-overlap property.
We introduce a task that we call partial decoupling, in which a bipartite quantum state is transformed by a unitary operation on one of the two subsystems and then is subject to the action of a quantum channel. We assume that the subsystem is decomposed into a direct-sum-product form, which often appears in the context of quantum information theory. The unitary is chosen at random from the set of unitaries having a simple form under the decomposition. The goal of the task is to make the final state, for typical choices of the unitary, close to the averaged final state over the unitaries. We consider a one-shot scenario, and derive upper and lower bounds on the average distance between the two states. The bounds are represented simply in terms of smooth conditional entropies of quantum states involving the initial state, the channel and the decomposition. Thereby we provide generalizations of the one-shot decoupling theorem. The obtained result would lead to further development of the decoupling approaches in quantum information theory and fundamental physics.