We show that the quantum smooth label cover problem is undecidable and RE-hard. This sharply contrasts the quantum unique label cover problem, which can be decided efficiently by a result of Kempe, Regev, and Toner (FOCS'08). On the other hand, our result aligns with the RE-hardness of the quantum label cover problem, which follows from the celebrated MIP* = RE result of Ji, Natarajan, Vidick, Wright, and Yuen (ACM'21). Additionally, we show that the quantum oracularized smooth label cover problem is RE-hard. Our second result fits with the alternative quantum unique games conjecture recently proposed by Mousavi and Spirig (ITCS'25) on the RE-hardness of the quantum oracularized unique label cover problem. Our proof techniques include a quantum version of Feige's reduction from 3SAT to 3SAT5 (STOC'96) for BCSMIP*-protocols, which may be of independent interest.

In complexity theory, gap-preserving reductions play a crucial role in studying hardness of approximation and in analyzing the relative complexity of multiprover interactive proof systems. In the quantum setting, multiprover interactive proof systems with entangled provers correspond to gapped promise problems for nonlocal games, and the recent result MIP*=RE [1] shows that these are in general undecidable. However, the relative complexity of problems within MIP* is still not well-understood, as establishing gap-preserving reductions in the quantum setting presents new challenges. In this paper, we introduce a framework to study such reductions and use it to establish MIP*-completeness of the gapped promise problem for the natural class of independent set games. In such a game, the goal is to determine whether a given graph contains an independent set of a specified size. We construct families of independent set games with constant question size for which the gapped promise problem is undecidable. In contrast, the same problem is decidable in polynomial time in the classical setting. To carry out our reduction, we establish a new stability theorem, which could be of independent interest, allowing us to perturb families of aThis is a striking phenomenlmost PVMs to genuine PVMs.

After the NP-hardness of computational problems such as 3SAT and MaxCut was established, a natural next step was to explore whether these problems remain hard to approximate. While the quantum nonlocal games extensions of some of these problems are known to be hard - indeed undecidable - their inapproximability remains largely unresolved. In this work, we introduce definitions for the quantum extensions of Label-Cover and Unique-Label-Cover. We show that these problems play a similarly crucial role in studying the inapproximability of quantum constraint satisfaction problems as they do in the classical setting.

Noncommutative constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) are higher-dimensional operator extensions of classical CSPs. Their approximability remains largely unexplored. A notable example of a noncommutative CSP that is not solvable in polynomial time is NC-Max-3-Cut. We present a 0.864-approximation algorithm for this problem. Our approach extends to a broader class of both classical and noncommutative CSPs. We introduce three key concepts: approximate isometry, relative distribution, and generalized anticommutation, which may be of independent interest.