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IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT)

Duality of channels and codes

Joseph M. Renes

Published Jun 1, 2017• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

For any given channel W with classical inputs and possibly quantum outputs, a dual classical-input channel W⊥can be defined by embedding the original into a channel N with quantum inputs and outputs. Here we give new uncertainty relations for a general class of entropies that lead to very close relationships between the original channel and its dual. Moreover, we show that channel duality can be combined with duality of linear codes, whereupon the uncertainty relations imply that the performance of a given code over a given channel is entirely characterized by the performance of the dual code on the dual channel. This has several applications. In the context of polar codes, it implies that the rates of polarization to ideal and useless channels must be identical. Duality also relates the tasks of channel coding and privacy amplification, implying that the finite blocklength performance of extractors and codes is precisely linked, and that optimal rate extractors can be transformed into capacity-achieving codes, and vice versa. Finally, duality also extends to the EXIT function of any channel and code. Here it implies that for any channel family, if the EXIT function for a fixed code has a sharp transition, then it must be such that the rate of the code equals the capacity at the transition. This may give a different route to proving a code family achieves capacity by establishing EXIT function transitions.

DOI
10.1109/isit.2017.8006598

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For any given channel W with classical inputs and can be defined by embedding the original into a channel N with quantum inputs and outputs. Here, we give new uncertainty relations for a general class of entropies that lead to very close relationships between the original channel and its dual. Moreover, we show that channel duality can be combined with duality of linear codes, whereupon the uncertainty relations imply that the performance of a given code over a given channel is entirely characterized by the performance of the dual code on the dual channel. This has several applications. In the context of polar codes, it implies that the rates of polarization to ideal and useless channels must be identical. Duality also relates the tasks of channel coding and privacy amplification, implying that the finite blocklength performance of extractors and codes is precisely linked, and those optimal rate extractors can be transformed into capacity-achieving codes, and vice versa. Finally, duality also extends to the EXIT function of any channel and code. Here, it implies that for any channel family, if the EXIT function for a fixed code has a sharp transition, then it must be such that the rate of the code equals the capacity at the transition. This gives a different route to proving a code family achieves capacity by establishing sharp EXIT function transitions.

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For any given channel W with classical inputs and possibly quantum outputs, a dual classical-input channel W⊥can be defined by embedding the original into a channel N with quantum inputs and outputs. Here we give new uncertainty relations for a general class of entropies that lead to very close relationships between the original channel and its dual. Moreover, we show that channel duality can be combined with duality of linear codes, whereupon the uncertainty relations imply that the performance of a given code over a given channel is entirely characterized by the performance of the dual code on the dual channel. This has several applications. In the context of polar codes, it implies that the rates of polarization to ideal and useless channels must be identical. Duality also relates the tasks of channel coding and privacy amplification, implying that the finite blocklength performance of extractors and codes is precisely linked, and that optimal rate extractors can be transformed into capacity-achieving codes, and vice versa. Finally, duality also extends to the EXIT function of any channel and code. Here it implies that for any channel family, if the EXIT function for a fixed code has a sharp transition, then it must be such that the rate of the code equals the capacity at the transition. This may give a different route to proving a code family achieves capacity by establishing EXIT function transitions.
For any given channel W with classical inputs and can be defined by embedding the original into a channel N with quantum inputs and outputs. Here, we give new uncertainty relations for a general class of entropies that lead to very close relationships between the original channel and its dual. Moreover, we show that channel duality can be combined with duality of linear codes, whereupon the uncertainty relations imply that the performance of a given code over a given channel is entirely characterized by the performance of the dual code on the dual channel. This has several applications. In the context of polar codes, it implies that the rates of polarization to ideal and useless channels must be identical. Duality also relates the tasks of channel coding and privacy amplification, implying that the finite blocklength performance of extractors and codes is precisely linked, and those optimal rate extractors can be transformed into capacity-achieving codes, and vice versa. Finally, duality also extends to the EXIT function of any channel and code. Here, it implies that for any channel family, if the EXIT function for a fixed code has a sharp transition, then it must be such that the rate of the code equals the capacity at the transition. This gives a different route to proving a code family achieves capacity by establishing sharp EXIT function transitions.
We examine the task of privacy amplification from information-theoretic and coding-theoretic points of view. In the former, we give a one-shot characterization of the optimal rate of privacy amplification against classical adversaries in terms of the optimal type-II error in asymmetric hypothesis testing. This formulation can be easily computed to give finite- blocklength bounds and turns out to be equivalent to smooth min-entropy bounds by Renner and Wolf [Asiacrypt 2005] and Watanabe and Hayashi [ISIT 2013], as well as a bound in terms of the Eγdivergence by Yang, Schaefer, and Poor [arXiv:1706.03866 [cs.IT]]. In the latter, we show that protocols for privacy amplification based on linear codes can be easily repurposed for lossy compression. Our construction leads to protocols of optimal rate in the asymptotic i.i.d. limit for a variety of compression scenarios. Finally, appealing to the notion of channel duality recently detailed by us in [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 64,577 (2018)], we show that linear error-correcting codes for symmetric channels with quantum output can be transformed into linear lossy source coding schemes for classical variables arising from the dual channel. This explains a “curious duality” in these problems for the (self-dual) erasure channel observed by Martinian and Yedidia [Allerton 2003; arXiv:cs/0408008] and partly anticipates recent results on optimal lossy compression by polar and low-density generator matrix codes.
We examine the task of privacy amplification from information-theoretic and coding-theoretic points of view. In the former, we give a one-shot characterization of the optimal rate of privacy amplification against classical adversaries in terms of the optimal type-II error in asymmetric hypothesis testing. The converse significantly improves on previous bounds based on smooth min-entropy by Watanabe and Hayashi [7] and turns out to be equivalent to a recent formulation in terms of the Eγ divergence by Yang et al. [9]. In the latter, we show that the protocols for privacy amplification based on linear codes can be easily repurposed for channel simulation. Combined with the known relations between channel simulation and lossy source coding, this implies that the privacy amplification can be understood as a basic primitive for both channel simulation and lossy compression. Applied to symmetric channels or lossy compression settings, our construction leads to protocols of the optimal rate in the asymptotic i.i.d. limit. Finally, appealing to the notion of channel duality recently detailed by us in [15], we show that the linear error-correcting codes for symmetric channels with quantum output can be transformed into linear lossy source coding schemes for classical variables arising from the dual channel. This explains a “curious duality” in these problems for the (self-dual) erasure channel observed by Martinian and Yedidia [16] and partly anticipates recent results on optimal lossy compression by polar and low-density generator matrix codes.
Holevo, Schumacher, and Westmoreland's coding theorem guarantees the existence of codes that are capacity-achieving for the task of sending classical data over a channel with classical inputs and quantum outputs. Although they demonstrated the existence of such codes, their proof does not provide an explicit construction of codes for this task. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap by constructing near-explicit “polar” codes that are capacity-achieving. The codes exploit the channel polarization phenomenon observed by Arikan for the case of classical channels. Channel polarization is an effect in which one can synthesize a set of channels, by “channel combining” and “channel splitting,” in which a fraction of the synthesized channels are perfect for data transmission, while the other channels are completely useless for data transmission, with the good fraction equal to the capacity of the channel. The channel polarization effect then leads to a simple scheme for data transmission: send the information bits through the perfect channels and “frozen” bits through the useless ones. The main technical contributions of this paper are threefold. First, we leverage several known results from the quantum information literature to demonstrate that the channel polarization effect occurs for channels with classical inputs and quantum outputs. We then construct linear polar codes based on this effect, and the encoding complexity isO(NlogN), whereNis the blocklength of the code. We also demonstrate that a quantum successive cancellation decoder works well, in the sense that the word error rate decays exponentially with the blocklength of the code. For this last result, we exploit Sen's recent “noncommutative union bound” that holds for a sequence of projectors applied to a quantum state.
In 2018, Renes [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 64, no. 1, pp. 577-592 (2018)] developed a general theory of channel duality for classical-input quantum-output channels. His result shows that a number of well-known duality results for linear codes on the binary erasure channel can be extended to general classical channels at the expense of using dual problems which are intrinsically quantum mechanical. One special case of this duality is a connection between coding for error correction on the quantum pure-state channel (PSC) and coding for wiretap secrecy on the classical binary symmetric channel (BSC). Similarly, coding for error correction on the BSC is related to wire-tap secrecy on the PSC. While this result has important implications for classical coding, the machinery behind the general duality result is rather challenging for researchers without a strong background in quantum information theory. In this work, we leverage prior results for linear codes on PSCs to give an alternate derivation of the aforementioned special case by computing closed-form expressions for the performance metrics. The noted prior results include the optimality of square-root measurement for linear codes on the PSC and the Fourier duality of linear codes.
In 2018, Renes [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 64, no. 1, pp. 577-592 (2018)] (arXiv:1701.05583) developed a general theory of channel duality for classical-input quantum-output (CQ) channels. That result showed that a number of well-known duality results for linear codes on the binary erasure channel could be extended to general classical channels at the expense of using dual problems which are intrinsically quantum mechanical. One special case of this duality is a connection between coding for error correction (resp. wire-tap secrecy) on the quantum pure-state channel (PSC) and coding for wire-tap secrecy (resp. error correction) on the classical binary symmetric channel (BSC). While this result has important implications for classical coding, the machinery behind the general duality result is rather challenging for researchers without a strong background in quantum information theory. In this work, we leverage prior results for linear codes on PSCs to give an alternate derivation of the aforementioned special case by computing closed-form expressions for the performance metrics. The noted prior results include optimality of the square-root measurement (SRM) for linear codes on the PSC and the Fourier duality of linear codes. We also show that the SRM forms a suboptimal measurement for channel coding on the BSC (when interpreted as a CQ problem) and secret communications on the PSC. Our proofs only require linear algebra and basic group theory, though we use the quantum Dirac notation for convenience.