This thesis consists of two parts: quantum compression and quantum learning theory. A common theme between these problems is that we study them through the lens of information theory. \n \nWe first study the task of visible compression of an ensemble of quantum states with entanglement assistance in the one-shot setting. The protocols achieving the best compression use many more qubits of shared entanglement than the number of qubits in the states in the ensemble. Other compression protocols, with potentially higher communication cost, have entanglement cost bounded by the number of qubits in the given states. This motivates the question as to whether entanglement is truly necessary for compression, and if so, how much of it is needed. We show that an ensemble given by Jain, Radhakrishnan, and Sen (ICALP'03) cannot be compressed by more than a constant number of qubits without shared entanglement, while in the presence of shared entanglement, the communication cost of compression can be arbitrarily smaller than the entanglement cost. \n \nNext, we study the task of quantum state redistribution, the most general version of compression of quantum states. We design a protocol for this task with communication cost in terms of a measure of distance from quantum Markov chains. More precisely, the distance is defined in terms of quantum max-relative entropy and quantum hypothesis testing entropy. Our result is the first to connect quantum state redistribution and Markov chains and gives an operational interpretation for a possible one-shot analogue of quantum conditional mutual information. The communication cost of our protocol is lower than all previously known ones and asymptotically achieves the well-known rate of quantum conditional mutual information. \n \nIn the last part, we focus on quantum algorithms for learning Boolean functions using quantum examples. We consider two commonly studied models of learning, namely, quantum PAC learning and quantum agnostic learning. We reproduce the optimal lower bounds by Arunachalam and de Wolf (JMLR’18) for the sample complexity of either of these models using information theory and spectral analysis. Our proofs are simpler than the previous ones and the techniques can be possibly extended to similar scenarios.
This thesis consists of two parts: quantum compression and quantum learning theory. A common theme between these problems is that we study them through the lens of information theory. \n \nWe first study the task of visible compression of an ensemble of quantum states with entanglement assistance in the one-shot setting. The protocols achieving the best compression use many more qubits of shared entanglement than the number of qubits in the states in the ensemble. Other compression protocols, with potentially higher communication cost, have entanglement cost bounded by the number of qubits in the given states. This motivates the question as to whether entanglement is truly necessary for compression, and if so, how much of it is needed. We show that an ensemble given by Jain, Radhakrishnan, and Sen (ICALP'03) cannot be compressed by more than a constant number of qubits without shared entanglement, while in the presence of shared entanglement, the communication cost of compression can be arbitrarily smaller than the entanglement cost. \n \nNext, we study the task of quantum state redistribution, the most general version of compression of quantum states. We design a protocol for this task with communication cost in terms of a measure of distance from quantum Markov chains. More precisely, the distance is defined in terms of quantum max-relative entropy and quantum hypothesis testing entropy. Our result is the first to connect quantum state redistribution and Markov chains and gives an operational interpretation for a possible one-shot analogue of quantum conditional mutual information. The communication cost of our protocol is lower than all previously known ones and asymptotically achieves the well-known rate of quantum conditional mutual information. \n \nIn the last part, we focus on quantum algorithms for learning Boolean functions using quantum examples. We consider two commonly studied models of learning, namely, quantum PAC learning and quantum agnostic learning. We reproduce the optimal lower bounds by Arunachalam and de Wolf (JMLR’18) for the sample complexity of either of these models using information theory and spectral analysis. Our proofs are simpler than the previous ones and the techniques can be possibly extended to similar scenarios.
We revisit the task of visible compression of an ensemble of quantum states with entanglement assistance in the one-shot setting. The protocols achieving the best compression use many more qubits of shared entanglement than the number of qubits in the states in the ensemble. Other compression protocols, with potentially larger communication cost, have entanglement cost bounded by the number of qubits in the given states. This motivates the question as to whether entanglement is truly necessary for compression, and if so, how much of it is needed. Motivated by questions in communication complexity, we lift certain restrictions that are placed on compression protocols in tasks such as state-splitting and channel simulation. We show that an ensemble of the form designed by Jain, Radhakrishnan, and Sen (ICALP'03) saturates the known bounds on the sum of communication and entanglement costs, even with the relaxed compression protocols we study. The ensemble and the associated one-way communication protocol have several remarkable properties. The ensemble is incompressible by more than a constant number of qubits without shared entanglement, even when constant error is allowed. Moreover, in the presence of shared entanglement, the communication cost of compression can be arbitrarily smaller than the entanglement cost. The quantum information cost of the protocol can thus be arbitrarily smaller than the cost of compression without shared entanglement. The ensemble can also be used to show the impossibility of reducing, via compression, the shared entanglement used in two-party protocols for computing Boolean functions.
We revisit the task of quantum state redistribution in the one-shot setting, and design a protocol for this task with communication cost in terms of a measure of distance from quantum Markov chains. More precisely, the distance is defined in terms of quantum max-relative entropy and quantum hypothesis testing entropy. Our result is the first to operationally connect quantum state redistribution and quantum Markov chains, and can be interpreted as an operational interpretation for a possible one-shot analogue of quantum conditional mutual information. The communication cost of our protocol is lower than all previously known ones and asymptotically achieves the well-known rate of quantum conditional mutual information. Thus, our work takes a step towards an optimal characterization of the resources required for one-shot quantum state redistribution, an important open problem in quantum Shannon theory.
We revisit the task of quantum state redistribution in the one-shot setting, and design a protocol for this task with communication cost in terms of a measure of distance from quantum Markov chains. More precisely, the distance is defined in terms of quantum max-relative entropy and quantum hypothesis testing entropy. Our result is the first to operationally connect one-shot quantum state redistribution and quantum Markov chains, and can be interpreted as an operational interpretation for a possible one-shot analogue of quantum conditional mutual information. The communication cost of our protocol is lower than all previously known ones and asymptotically achieves the well-known rate of quantum conditional mutual information. Thus, our work takes a step towards the important open question of near-optimal characterization of the one-shot quantum state redistribution. A full version of this paper is accessible at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.08753.pdf
This thesis addresses problems in the field of quantum information theory. The first part of the thesis is opened with concrete definitions of general quantum source models and their compression, and each subsequent chapter addresses the compression of a specific source model as a special case of the initially defined general models. First, we find the optimal compression rate of a general mixed state source which includes as special cases all the previously studied models such as Schumacher's pure and ensemble sources and other mixed state ensemble models. For an interpolation between the visible and blind Schumacher's ensemble model, we find the optimal compression rate region for the entanglement and quantum rates. Later, we study the classical-quantum variation of the celebrated Slepian-Wolf problem and the ensemble model of quantum state redistribution for which we find the optimal compression rate considering per-copy fidelity and single-letter achievable and converse bounds matching up to continuity of functions which appear in the corresponding bounds. The second part of the thesis revolves around information theoretical perspective of quantum thermodynamics. We start with a resource theory point of view of a quantum system with multiple non-commuting charges. Subsequently, we apply this resource theory framework to study a traditional thermodynamics setup with multiple non-commuting conserved quantities consisting of a main system, a thermal bath and batteries to store various conserved quantities of the system. We state the laws of the thermodynamics for this system, and show that a purely quantum effect happens in some transformations of the system, that is, some transformations are feasible only if there are quantum correlations between the final state of the system and the thermal bath.
Quantum information processing (QIP) studies the representation, manipulation, and transmission of information using quantum systems. By leveraging counterintuitive quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement, QIP enables new paradigms for computation, communication, and learning that can surpass classical limits in certain regimes. Foundational tasks in QIP include quantum data compression, quantum communication, and quantum learning and optimization, which together form the basis for scalable quantum technologies. This thesis develops new frameworks and algorithms at the intersection of quantum information theory, quantum learning, and quantum-inspired modeling. The thesis is organized into three parts. The first part studies quantum compression problems; the second addresses quantum communication; and the third develops quantum learning and optimization frameworks with applications to complex systems. In the first part, a new formulation for lossy quantum-classical source coding, termed rate-channel theory, is introduced, replacing the conventional distortion-based formulation with a posterior-channel-based framework under a block-error criterion. The framework is further generalized to incorporate quantum side information at the decoder. A connection between rate-channel theory and classical rate-distortion theory is also established, showing that optimal rate-distortion performance can be recovered under suitable conditions. These results provide a unified and flexible framework for data compression, which is essential for scalable quantum computing infrastructure, enabling efficient storage of quantum data, such as outputs from quantum sensors (e.g., MRI) and information encoded in photonic systems for satellite and optical communication. In the second part, the problem of computing functions of distributed sources over classical-quantum multiple access channels is studied. A new coding framework is developed that combines algebraic structured codes with unstructured random coding techniques, enabling efficient communication of functions without reconstructing individual sources. The resulting achievable conditions, expressed in terms of single-letter quantum information quantities, strictly enlarge the class of sources for which reliable computation is possible. These results contribute to the theoretical foundations of quantum network communication and are directly relevant to deep-space satellite-based quantum communication, distributed quantum computing, and the design of scalable quantum network infrastructures. In the final part, new approaches to quantum learning and optimization are developed. A geometry-aware quantum optimization framework is proposed based on a novel quantum information metric and an unbiased estimator constructed from single-shot measurements. This leads to an optimization method with constant sample complexity per iteration and provable exponential convergence under mild conditions, while avoiding saddle points and local minima. Such advances are particularly relevant for challenging optimization tasks in quantum sensing and quantum computational modeling of many-body systems. Building on this optimization framework, a Hamiltonian learning approach is introduced to infer interaction structures from time-resolved measurement data, with finite-sample guarantees and polynomial scaling with system size. This framework is further extended to develop a quantum-inspired generative model for gene regulatory network inference, where interactions are encoded as a parameterized Hamiltonian evolving over pseudotime. The proposed methods demonstrate strong performance on synthetic benchmarks and reveal biologically meaningful structures in real-world data, with applications to multi-omics integration, cancer genomics, and systems biology. Overall, this thesis advances the theoretical and algorithmic foundations of quantum information processing, with contributions spanning compression, communication, and learning. These developments support the design of resource-efficient and scalable quantum technologies, enabling applications in quantum sensing, quantum networks, distributed quantum computation, and the modeling of complex physical and biological systems.
Data compression is a fundamental problem in quantum and classical information theory. A typical version of the problem is that the sender Alice receives a (classical or quantum) state from some known ensemble and needs to transmit them to the receiver Bob with average error below some specified bound. We consider the case in which the message can have a variable length and the goal is to minimize its expected length. For classical messages this problem has a well-known solution given by Huffman coding. In this scheme, the expected length of the message is equal to the Shannon entropy of the source (with a constant additive factor) and the scheme succeeds with zero error. This is a single-shot result which implies the asymptotic result, viz. Shannon's source coding theorem, by encoding each state sequentially. For the quantum case, the asymptotic compression rate is given by the von-Neumann entropy. However, we show that there is no one-shot scheme which is able to match this rate, even if interactive communication is allowed. This is a relatively rare case in quantum information theory when the cost of a quantum task is significantly different than the classical analogue. Our result has implications for direct sum theorems in quantum communication complexity and one-shot formulations of Quantum Reverse Shannon theorem.