Upper Bounds on Communication in Terms of Approximate Rank

Anna Gál, Ridwan Syed

Anurag Anshu, Shalev Ben-David, Ankit Garg +3 more

One of the best lower bound methods for the quantum communication complexity of a function H (with or without shared entanglement) is the logarithm of the approximate rank of the communication matrix of H. This measure is essentially equivalent to the approximate gamma-2 norm and generalized discrepancy, and subsumes several other lower bounds. All known lower bounds on quantum communication complexity in the general unbounded-round model can be shown via the logarithm of approximate rank, and it was an open problem to give any separation at all between quantum communication complexity and the logarithm of the approximate rank. In this work we provide the first such separation: We exhibit a total function H with quantum communication complexity almost quadratically larger than the logarithm of its approximate rank. We construct H using the communication lookup function framework of Anshu et al. (FOCS 2016) based on the cheat sheet framework of Aaronson et al. (STOC 2016). From a starting function F, this framework defines a new function H=F_G. Our main technical result is a lower bound on the quantum communication complexity of F_G in terms of the discrepancy of F, which we do via quantum information theoretic arguments. We show the upper bound on the approximate rank of F_G by relating it to the Boolean circuit size of the starting function F.

Moni Naor, Alon Orlitsky

Gemma De las Cuevas, Andreas Klingler, Tim Netzer

It is well known that tensor decompositions show separations, that is, constraints on local terms (such as positivity) may entail an arbitrarily high cost in their representation. Here, we show that many of these separations disappear in the approximate case. Specifically, for every approximation error ɛ and norm, we define the approximate rank as the minimum rank of an element in the ɛ-ball with respect to that norm. For positive semidefinite matrices, we show that the separations between rank, purification rank, and separable rank disappear for a large class of Schatten p-norms. For non-negative tensors, we show that the separations between rank, positive semidefinite rank, and non-negative rank disappear for all ℓp-norms with p > 1. For the trace norm (p = 1), we obtain upper bounds that depend on the ambient dimension. We also provide a deterministic algorithm to obtain the approximate decomposition attaining our bounds. Our main tool is an approximate version of the Carathéodory theorem. Our results imply that many separations are not robust under small perturbations of the tensor, with implications in quantum many-body systems and communication complexity.

Lianna Hambardzumyan, Hamed Hatami, Pooya Hatami

Adi Shraibman