Person:

Anshu, Anurag

Smooth entropies are a tool for quantifying resource trade-offs in (quantum) information theory and cryptography. In typical bi- and multi-partite problems, however, some of the sub-systems are often left unchanged and this is not reflected by the standard smoothing of information measures over a ball of close states. We propose to smooth instead only over a ball of close states which also have some of the reduced states on the relevant sub-systems fixed. This partial smoothing of information measures naturally allows to give more refined characterizations of various information-theoretic problems in the one-shot setting. In particular, we immediately get asymptotic second-order characterizations for tasks such as privacy amplification against classical side information or classical state splitting. For quantum problems like state merging the general resource trade-off is tightly characterized by partially smoothed information measures as well.

Capacity of a quantum channel characterizes the limits of reliable communication through a noisy quantum channel. This fundamental information theoretic question is very well studied specially in the setting of many independent uses of the channel. An important scenario, both from practical and conceptual point of view, is when the channel can be used only once. This is known as the one-shot channel coding problem. We provide a tight characterization of the one-shot entanglement assisted classical capacity of a quantum channel. We arrive at our result by introducing a simple decoding technique which we refer to as position-based decoding. We also consider two other important quantum network scenarios: quantum channel with a jammer and quantum broadcast channel. For these problems, we use the recently introduced convex split technique [Anshu, Devabathini and Jain 2014] in addition to position based decoding. Our approach exhibits that the simultaneous use of these two techniques provides a uniform and conceptually simple framework for designing communication protocols for quantum networks.

We consider the problem of quantum measurement compression with side information in the one-shot setting with shared randomness. In this problem, Alice shares a pure state with Reference and Bob and she performs a measurement on her registers. She wishes to communicate the outcome of this measurement to Bob using shared randomness and classical communication, in such a way that the outcome that Bob receives is correctly correlated with Reference and Bob's own registers. Our goal is to simultaneously minimize the classical communication and randomness cost. We provide a protocol based on convex-split and position based decoding with its communication upper bounded in terms of smooth max and hypothesis testing relative entropies. We also study the randomness cost of our protocol in both one-shot and asymptotic and i.i.d. setting. By generalizing the convex-split technique to incorporate pair-wise independent random variables, we show that our one shot protocol requires small number of bits of shared randomness. This allows us to construct a new protocol in the asymptotic and i.i.d. setting, which is optimal in both the number of bits of communication and the number of bits of shared randomness required. We construct a new protocol for the task of strong randomness extraction in the presence of quantum side information. Our protocol achieves error guarantee in terms of relative entropy (as opposed to trace distance) and extracts close to optimal number of uniform bits. As an application, we provide new achievability result for the task of quantum measurement compression without feedback, in which Alice does not need to know the outcome of the measurement. This leads to the optimal number of bits communicated and number of bits of shared randomness required, for this task in the asymptotic and i.i.d. setting.

We study the problem of entanglement-assisted quantum state redistribution in the one-shot setting and provide a new achievability result on the quantum communication required. Our bounds are in terms of the max-relative entropy and the hypothesis testing relative entropy. We use the techniques of convex split and position-based decoding to arrive at our result. We show that our result is upper bounded by the result obtained in Berta, Christandl, Touchette (2016).

In this paper we present the following quantum compression protocol: P : Let ρ,σ be quantum states such that S(ρ||σ)=Tr(ρlogρ−ρlogσ), the relative entropy between ρ and σ, is finite. Alice gets to know the eigen-decomposition of ρ. Bob gets to know the eigen-decomposition of σ. Both Alice and Bob know S(ρ||σ) and an error parameter ϵ. Alice and Bob use shared entanglement and after communication of ((S(ρ||σ)+1)/ϵ4) bits from Alice to Bob, Bob ends up with a quantum state ρ̃ such that F(ρ,ρ̃ )≥1−5ϵ, where F(⋅) represents fidelity. This result can be considered as a non-commutative generalization of a result due to Braverman and Rao [2011] where they considered the special case when ρ and σ are classical probability distributions (or commute with each other) and use shared randomness instead of shared entanglement. We use P to obtain an alternate proof of a direct-sum result for entanglement assisted quantum one-way communication complexity for all relations, which was first shown by Jain, Radhakrishnan and Sen [2005,2008]. We also present a variant of protocol P in which Bob has some side information about the state with Alice. We show that in such a case, the amount of communication can be further reduced, based on the side information that Bob has. Our second result provides a quantum analogue of the widely used classical correlated-sampling protocol. For example, Holenstein [2007] used the classical correlated-sampling protocol in his proof of a parallel-repetition theorem for two-player one-round games.

We consider the following communication task in the multi-party setting, which involves a joint random variable XYZMN with the property that M is independent of YZN conditioned on X and N is independent of XZM conditioned on Y. Three parties Alice, Bob and Charlie, respectively, observe samples x,y and z from XYZ. Alice and Bob communicate messages to Charlie with the goal that Charlie can output a sample from MN having correct correlation with XYZ. This task reflects the simultaneous message passing model of communication complexity. Furthermore, it is a generalization of some well studied problems in information theory, such as distributed source coding, source coding with a helper and one sender and one receiver message compression. It is also closely related to the lossy distributed source coding task. Our main result is an achievable communication region for this task in the one-shot setting, through which we obtain a near optimal characterization using auxiliary random variables of bounded size. We employ our achievability result to provide a near-optimal one-shot communication region for the task of lossy distributed source coding, in terms of auxiliary random variables of bounded size. Finally, we show that interaction is necessary to achieve the optimal expected communication cost for our main task.

In blind compression of quantum states, a sender Alice is given a specimen of a quantum state ρ drawn from a known ensemble (but without knowing what ρ is), and she transmits sufficient quantum data to a receiver Bob so that he can decode a near perfect specimen of ρ. For many such states drawn iid from the ensemble, the asymptotically achievable rate is the number of qubits required to be transmitted per state. The Holevo information is a lower bound for the achievable rate, and is attained for pure state ensembles, or in the related scenario of entanglement-assisted visible compression of mixed states wherein Alice knows what state is drawn. In this paper, we prove a general and robust lower bound on the achievable rate for ensembles of classical states, which holds even in the least demanding setting when Alice and Bob share free entanglement and a constant per-copy error is allowed. We apply the bound to a specific ensemble of only two states and prove a near-maximal separation (saturating the dimension bound in leading order) between the best achievable rate and the Holevo information for constant error. This also implies that the ensemble is incompressible -- compression does not reduce the communication cost by much. Since the states are classical, the observed incompressibility is not fundamentally quantum mechanical. We lower bound the difference between the achievable rate and the Holevo information in terms of quantitative limitations to clone the specimen or to distinguish the two classical states.

We study the communication capabilities of a quantum channel under the most general channel model known as the one-shot model. Unlike classical channels that can only be used to transmit classical information (bits), a quantum channel can be used for transmission of classical information, quantum information (qubits) and simultaneous transmission of classical and quantum information. In this work, we investigate the one-shot capabilities of a quantum channel for simultaneously transmitting of bits and qubits. This problem was studied in the asymptotic regime for a memoryless channel and a regularized characterization of the capacity region was reported. It is known that the transmission of private classical information is closely related to the problem of quantum information transmission. We resort to this idea and find achievable and converse bounds on the simultaneous transmission of the public and private classical information. then by shifting the classical private rate to the quantum information rate, the obtained rate regions will be translated into rate regions of thThis in turn, leads to a rate region for simulttaneous transmission of classical and quantum information. In the case of asymptotic i.i.d. setting, our one-shot result is evaluated to the known results in the literature. Our main tools used in the achievability proofs are position-based decoding and convex-split lemma.

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 the important open question of near-optimal characterization of the one-shot quantum state redistribution.

We consider a variation of the well-studied quantum state redistribution task, in which the starting state is known only to the receiver Bob and not to the sender Alice. We refer to this as quantum state redistribution with a one-sided promise. In addition, we consider communication from Alice to Bob over a noisy channel , instead of the noiseless channel, as is usually considered in state redistribution. We take a natural approach towards the solution of this problem where we "embed" the promise as part of the state and then invoke known protocols for quantum state redistribution composed with known protocols for transfer of quantum information over noisy channels. Using our approach, we are able to reproduce the Alpha-bit capacities with or without entanglement assistance in Ref. [arXiv:1706.09434], using known protocols for quantum state redistribution and quantum communication over noisy channels. Furthermore, we generalize the entanglement assisted classical Alpha-bit capacity, showing that any quantum state redistribution protocol can be used as a black box to simulate classical communication.