This paper investigates the role of interaction and coins in quantum Arthur--Merlin games (also called public-coin quantum interactive proof systems). While the existing model restricts the messages from the verifier to be classical even in the quantum setting, the present work introduces a generalized version of quantum Arthur--Merlin games where the messages from the verifier can be quantum as well: the verifier can send not only random bits, but also halves of EPR pairs (to share with the prover). This generalization turns out to provide several novel characterizations of quantum interactive proof systems with a constant number of turns. First, it is proved that the complexity class corresponding to two-turn quantum Arthur--Merlin games where both of the two messages are quantum (denoted qq-QAM in this paper) does not change by adding a constant number of turns of classical interaction prior to the communications of qq-QAM proof systems. This can be viewed as a quantum analogue of the celebrated collapse theorem for AM due to Babai. To prove this collapse theorem, this paper presents a natural complete problem for qq-QAM: deciding whether the output of a given quantum circuit is close to a totally mixed state. This complete problem is on the very line of the previous studies investigating the hardness of checking properties related to quantum circuits, and thus qq-QAM may provide a good measure in computational complexity theory. It is further proved that the class ${qq-QAM}_1$, the perfect-completeness variant of qq-QAM, gives new bounds for standard well-studied classes of two-turn quantum interactive proof systems. Finally, the collapse theorem above is extended to comprehensively classify the role of classical and quantum interactions in quantum Arthur--Merlin games: it is proved that, for any constant $m\geq2$, the class of problems having $m$-turn quantum Arthur--Merlin proof systems is either equal to PSPACE or equal to the class of problems having two-turn quantum Arthur--Merlin proof systems of a specific type, which provides a complete set of quantum analogues of Babai's collapse theorem.

This paper presents a general space-efficient method for error reduction for unitary quantum computation. Consider a polynomial-time quantum computation with completeness c and soundness s, either with or without a witness (corresponding to QMA and BQP, respectively). To convert this computation into a new computation with error at most 2^{-p}, the most space-efficient method known requires extra workspace of O(p*log(1/(c-s))) qubits. This space requirement is too large for scenarios like logarithmic-space quantum computations. This paper shows an errorreduction method for unitary quantum computations (i.e., computations without intermediate measurements) that requires extra workspace of just O(log(p/(c-s))) qubits. This in particular gives the first method of strong amplification for logarithmic-space unitary quantum computations with two-sided bounded error. This also leads to a number of consequences in complexity theory, such as the uselessness of quantum witnesses in bounded-error logarithmic-space unitary quantum computations, the PSPACE upper bound for QMA with exponentially-small completeness-soundness gap, and strong amplification for matchgate computations.

A line of work initiated by Terhal and DiVincenzo and Bremner, Jozsa, and Shepherd, shows that quantum computers can efficiently sample from probability distributions that cannot be exactly sampled efficiently on a classical computer, unless the PH collapses. Aaronson and Arkhipov take this further by considering a distribution that can be sampled efficiently by linear optical quantum computation, that under two feasible conjectures, cannot even be approximately sampled classically within bounded total variation distance, unless the PH collapses. In this work we use Quantum Fourier Sampling to construct a class of distributions that can be sampled by a quantum computer. We then argue that these distributions cannot be approximately sampled classically, unless the PH collapses, under variants of the Aaronson and Arkhipov conjectures. In particular, we show a general class of quantumly sampleable distributions each of which is based on an "Efficiently Specifiable" polynomial, for which a classical approximate sampler implies an average-case approximation. This class of polynomials contains the Permanent but also includes, for example, the Hamiltonian Cycle polynomial, and many other familiar #P-hard polynomials. Although our construction, unlike that proposed by Aaronson and Arkhipov, likely requires a universal quantum computer, we are able to use this additional power to weaken the conjectures needed to prove approximate sampling hardness results.

This paper investigates the role of interaction and coins in quantum Arthur-Merlin games (also called public-coin quantum interactive proof systems). While the existing model restricts the messages from the verifier to be classical even in the quantum setting, the present work introduces a generalized version of quantum Arthur-Merlin games where the messages from the verifier can be quantum as well: the verifier can send not only random bits, but also halves of EPR pairs. This generalization turns out to provide several novel characterizations of quantum interactive proof systems with a constant number of turns. First, it is proved that the complexity class corresponding to two-turn quantum Arthur-Merlin games where both of the two messages are quantum, denoted qq-QAM in this paper, does not change by adding a constant number of turns of classical interaction prior to the communications of qq-QAM proof systems. This can be viewed as a quantum analogue of the celebrated collapse theorem for AM due to Babai. To prove this collapse theorem, this paper presents a natural complete problem for qq-QAM: deciding whether the output of a given quantum circuit is close to a totally mixed state. This complete problem is on the very line of the previous studies investigating the hardness of checking properties related to quantum circuits, and thus, qq-QAM may provide a good measure in computational complexity theory. It is further proved that the class qq-QAM_1, the perfect-completeness variant of qq-QAM, gives new bounds for standard well-studied classes of two-turn quantum interactive proof systems. Finally, the collapse theorem above is extended to comprehensively classify the role of classical and quantum interactions in quantum Arthur-Merlin games: it is proved that, for any constant m >= 2, the class of problems having $m$-turn quantum Arthur-Merlin proof systems is either equal to PSPACE or equal to the class of problems having two-turn quantum Arthur-Merlin proof systems of a specific type, which provides a complete set of quantum analogues of Babai's collapse theorem.

This paper presents stronger methods of achieving perfect completeness in quantum interactive proofs. It is proved that any problem in QMA has a two-message quantum interactive proof system with perfect completeness and constant soundness error, where the verifier has only to send a constant number of halves of EPR pairs. This in particular implies that the class QMA is necessarily included by the class ${{QIP}_1(2)}$ of problems having two-message quantum interactive proofs with perfect completeness, which gives the first nontrivial upper bound for QMA in terms of quantum interactive proofs. It is also proved that any problem having an m-message quantum interactive proof system necessarily has an (m+1)-message quantum interactive proof system with perfect completeness for every ${m \geq 2}$. This improves the previous construction due to Kitaev and Watrous, which increases the number of messages by two to achieve perfect completeness, if not using the parallelization result.

This paper presents stronger methods of achieving perfect completeness in quantum interactive proofs. First, it is proved that any problem in QMA has a two-message quantum interactive proof system of perfect completeness with constant soundness error, where the verifier has only to send a constant number of halves of EPR pairs. This in particular implies that the class QMA is necessarily included by the class QIP1(2)} of problems having two-message quantum interactive proofs of perfect completeness, which gives the first nontrivial upper bound for QMA in terms of quantum interactive proofs. It is also proved that any problem having an $m$-message quantum interactive proof system necessarily has an ${(m+1)}$-message quantum interactive proof system of perfect completeness. This improves the previous result due to Kitaev and Watrous, where the resulting system of perfect completeness requires ${m+2}$ messages if not using the parallelization result.

This paper proves that the computational power of quantum interactive proof systems, with a double-exponentially small gap in acceptance probability between the completeness and soundness cases, is precisely characterized by EXP, the class of problems solvable in exponential time by deterministic Turing machines. This fact, and our proof of it, has implications concerning quantum and classical interactive proof systems in the setting of unbounded error that include the following:

The k-pair problem in network coding theory asks to send k messages simultaneously between k source-target pairs over a directed acyclic graph. In a previous paper [ICALP 2009, Part I, pages 622-633] the present authors showed that if a classical k-pair problem is solvable by means of a linear coding scheme, then the quantum k-pair problem over the same graph is also solvable, provided that classical communication can be sent for free between any pair of nodes of the graph. Here we address the main case that remained open in our previous work, namely whether nonlinear classical network coding schemes can also give rise to quantum network coding schemes. This question is motivated by the fact that there are networks for which no linear solutions exist to the k-pair problem, whereas nonlinear solutions exist. In the present paper we overcome the limitation to linear protocols and describe a new communication protocol for perfect quantum network coding that improves over the previous one as follows: (i) the new protocol does not put any condition on the underlying classical coding scheme, that is, it can simulate nonlinear communication protocols as well, and (ii) the amount of classical communication sent in the protocol is significantly reduced.

We establish the first hardness results for the problem of computing the value of one-round games played by a verifier and a team of provers who can share quantum entanglement. In particular, we show that it is NP-hard to approximate within an inverse polynomial the value of a one-round game with (i) a quantum verifier and two entangled provers or (ii) a classical verifier and three entangled provers. Previously it was not even known if computing the value exactly is NP-hard. We also describe a mathematical conjecture, which, if true, would imply hardness of approximation of entangled-prover games to within a constant. Using our techniques we also show that every language in PSPACE has a two-prover one-round interactive proof system with perfect completeness and soundness $1-1/\,\mathrm{poly}$ even against entangled provers. We start our proof by describing two ways to modify classical multiprover games to make them resistant to entangled provers. We then show that a strategy for the modified game that uses entanglement can be “rounded” to one that does not. The results then follow from classical inapproximability bounds. Our work implies that, unless $\mathrm{P}=\mathrm{NP}$, the values of entangled-prover games cannot be computed by semidefinite programs that are polynomial in the size of the verifier's system, a method that has been successful for more restricted quantum games.

This paper considers a problem of quantum communication between parties that are connected through a network of quantum channels. The model in this paper assumes that there is no prior entanglement shared among any of the parties, but that classical communication is free. The task is to perfectly transfer an unknown quantum state from a source subsystem to a target subsystem, where both source and target are formed by ordered sets of some of the nodes. It is proved that a lower bound of the rate at which this quantum communication task is possible is given by the classical min-cut max-flow theorem of network coding, where the capacities in question are the quantum capacities of the edges of the network.

This paper presents three results on the power of two-prover one-round interactive proof systems based on oracularization under the existence of prior entanglement between dishonest provers. It is proved that the two-prover one-round interactive proof system for PSPACE by Cai, Condon, and Lipton [JCSS 48:183-193, 1994] still achieves exponentially small soundness error in the existence of prior entanglement between dishonest provers (and more strongly, even if dishonest provers are allowed to use arbitrary no-signaling strategies). It follows that, unless the polynomial-time hierarchy collapses to the second level, two-prover systems are still advantageous to single-prover systems even when only malicious provers can use quantum information. It is also shown that a "dummy" question may be helpful when constructing an entanglement-resistant multi-prover system via oracularization. This affirmatively settles a question posed by Kempe et al. [FOCS 2008, pp. 447-456] and every language in NEXP is proved to have a two-prover one-round interactive proof system even against entangled provers, albeit with exponentially small gap between completeness and soundness. In other words, it is NP-hard to approximate within an inverse-polynomial the value of a classical two-prover one-round game against entangled provers. Finally, both for the above proof system for NEXP and for the quantum two-prover one-round proof system for NEXP proposed by Kempe et al., it is proved that exponentially small completeness-soundness gaps are best achievable unless soundness analysis uses the structure of the underlying system with unentangled provers.

This paper proves that, if quantum communication and computation are available and the number of parties is given, the leader election problem can exactly (i.e., without error in bounded time) be solved with at most the same complexity up to a constant factor as that of computing certain symmetric functions on an anonymous network of any unknown topology. Together with a novel quantum algorithm that computes a certain symmetric function, this characterization yields a quantum leader election algorithm that is more efficient than existing algorithms.

A central question in quantum information theory and computational complexity is how powerful nonlocal strategies are in cooperative games with imperfect information, such as multi-prover interactive proof systems. This paper develops a new method for proving limits of nonlocal strategies that make use of prior entanglement among players (or, provers, in the terminology of multi-prover interactive proofs). Instead of proving the limits for usual isolated provers who initially share entanglement, this paper proves the limits for "commuting-operator provers", who share private space, but can apply only such operators that are commutative with any operator applied by other provers. Obviously, these commuting-operator provers are at least as powerful as usual isolated but prior-entangled provers, and thus, limits in the model with commuting-operator provers immediately give limits in the usual model with prior-entangled provers. Using this method, we obtain an n-party generalization of the Tsirelson bound for the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality, for every n. Our bounds are tight in the sense that, in every n-party case, the equality is achievable by a usual nonlocal strategy with prior entanglement. We also apply our method to a three-prover one-round binary interactive proof system for NEXP. Combined with the technique developed by Kempe, Kobayashi, Matsumoto, Toner and Vidick to analyze the soundness of the proof system, it is proved to be NP-hard to distinguish whether the entangled value of a three-prover one-round binary-answer game is equal to one or at most 1-1/p(n) for some polynomial p, where n is the number of questions. This is in contrast to the two-prover one-round binary-answer case, where the corresponding problem is efficiently decidable. Alternatively, NEXP has a three-prover one-round binary interactive proof system with perfect completeness and soundness 1 middot 2-poly.

The central question in quantum multi-prover interactive proof systems is whether or not entanglement shared among provers affects the verification power of the proof system. We study for the first time positive aspects of prior entanglement and show how it can be used to parallelize any multi- prover quantum interactive proof system to a one-round system with perfect completeness, soundness bounded away from 1 by an inverse polynomial in the input size, and one extra proven Alternatively, we can also parallelize to a three-turn system with the same number of provers, where the verifier only broadcasts the outcome of a coin flip. This "public-coin" property is somewhat surprising, since in the classical case public-coin multi-prover interactive proofs are equivalent to single prover ones.

We establish the first hardness results for the problem of computing the value of one-round games played by a referee and a team of players who can share quantum entanglement. In particular, we show that it is NP-hard to approximate within an inverse polynomial the value of a one-round game with (i) quantum referee and two entangled players or (ii) classical referee and three entangled players. Previously it was not even known if computing the value exactly is NP-hard. We also describe a mathematical conjecture, which, if true, would imply hardness of approximation to within a constant.We start our proof by describing two ways to modify classical multi-player games to make them resistant to entangled players. We then show that a strategy for the modified game that uses entanglement can be "rounded'' to one that does not. The results then follow from classical inapproximability bounds. Our work implies that, unless P = NP, the values of entangled-player games cannot be computed by semidefinite programs that are polynomial in the size of the referee's system, a method that has been successful for more restricted quantum games.