The class MIP* of quantum multiprover interactive proof systems with entanglement is much more powerful than its classical counterpart MIP [ 8 , 31 , 32 ]: while MIP = NEXP, the quantum class MIP * is equal to RE, a class including the halting problem. This is because the provers in MIP * can share unbounded quantum entanglement. However, recent works [ 53 , 54 ] have shown that this advantage is significantly reduced if the provers’ shared state contains noise. This article attempts to exactly characterize the effect of noise on the computational power of quantum multiprover interactive proof systems. We investigate the quantum two-prover one-round interactive system MIP * [poly, O (1)], where the verifier sends polynomially many bits to the provers and the provers send back constantly many bits. We show that noise completely destroys the computational advantage given by shared entanglement in this model. Specifically, we show that if the provers are allowed to share arbitrarily many EPR states, where each EPR state is affected by an arbitrarily small constant amount of noise, the resulting complexity class is equivalent to NEXP = MIP. This improves significantly on the previous best-known bound of NEEEXP (nondeterministic triply exponential time) [ 53 ]. We also show that this collapse in power is due to noise, rather than the O (1) answer size, by showing that allowing for noiseless EPR states gives the class the full power of RE = MIP * [poly, poly]. Along the way, we develop two technical tools of independent interest. First, we give a new, deterministic tester for the positivity of an exponentially large matrix, provided that it has a low-degree Fourier decomposition in terms of Pauli matrices. Secondly, we develop a new invariance principle for smooth matrix functions having bounded third-order Fréchet derivatives or which are Lipschitz continuous.

Quantum multiprover interactive proof systems with entanglement MIP* are much more powerful than its classical counterpart MIP (Babai et al. '91, Ji et al. '20): while MIP = NEXP, the quantum class MIP* is equal to RE, a class including the halting problem. This is because the provers in MIP* can share unbounded quantum entanglement. However, recent works of Qin and Yao '21 and '23 have shown that this advantage is significantly reduced if the provers' shared state contains noise. This paper attempts to exactly characterize the effect of noise on the computational power of quantum multiprover interactive proof systems. We investigate the quantum two-prover one-round interactive system MIP*[poly, O(1)], where the verifier sends polynomially many bits to the provers and the provers send back constantly many bits. We show noise completely destroys the computational advantage given by shared entanglement in this model. Specifically, we show that if the provers are allowed to share arbitrarily many noisy EPR states, where each EPR state is affected by an arbitrarily small constant amount of noise, the resulting complexity class is equivalent to NEXP = MIP. This improves significantly on the previous best-known bound of NEEEXP (nondeterministic triply exponential time) by Qin and Yao '21. We also show that this collapse in power is due to the noise, rather than the O(1) answer size, by showing that allowing for noiseless EPR states gives the class the full power of RE = MIP*[poly, poly]. Along the way, we develop two technical tools of independent interest. First, we give a new, deterministic tester for the positivity of an exponentially large matrix, provided it has a low-degree Fourier decomposition in terms of Pauli matrices. Secondly, we develop a new invariance principle for smooth matrix functions having bounded third-order Fréchet derivatives or which are Lipschitz continous.

We construct a succinct classical argument system for QMA, the quantum analogue of NP, from generic and standard cryptographic assumptions. Previously, building on the prior work of Mahadev (FOCS '18), Bartusek et al. (CRYPTo ‘22) also constructed a succinct classical argument system for Q M A. However, their construction relied on post-quantumly secure indistinguishability obfuscation, a very strong primitive which is not known from standard cryptographic assumptions. In contrast, the primitives we use (namely, collapsing hash functions and a mild version of quantum homomorphic encryption) are much weaker and are implied by standard assumptions such as LWE. Our protocol is constructed using a general transformation which was designed by Kalai et al. (STOC '23) as a candidate method to compile any quantum nonlocal game into an argument system. Our main technical contribution is to analyze the soundness of this transformation when it is applied to a succinct self-test for Pauli measurements on maximally entangled states, the latter of which is a key component in the proof of MIP * = R E in Quantum complexity.

It is a long-standing open question in quantum complexity theory whether the definition of $\textit{non-deterministic}$ quantum computation requires quantum witnesses $(\textsf{QMA})$ or if classical witnesses suffice $(\textsf{QCMA})$. We make progress on this question by constructing a randomized classical oracle separating the respective computational complexity classes. Previous separations [Aaronson-Kuperberg (CCC'07), Fefferman-Kimmel (MFCS'18)] required a quantum unitary oracle. The separating problem is deciding whether a distribution supported on regular un-directed graphs either consists of multiple connected components (yes instances) or consists of one expanding connected component (no instances) where the graph is given in an adjacency-list format by the oracle. Therefore, the oracle is a distribution over $n$-bit boolean functions.

We present a step towards the goal of producing a general cryptographic ’compilation’ procedure which can translate any entangled nonlocal game into a single-prover interactive protocol while preserving quantum completeness and soundness, using cryptography to simulate the separation between the provers. A candidate for such a procedure was introduced by Kalai et al. (STOC ’23), who defined a black-box cryptographic compilation procedure that applies to any nonlocal game and showed that it preserves classical value. In this work, we make progress towards a full understanding of the quantum value of the single-prover protocols that result from applying the Kalai et al. compilation procedure to entangled games. For the special case of CHSH, we prove that the Tsirelson bound holds under the compilation procedure introduced by Kalai et al., and we also recover a strong version of the ’rigidity’ property that makes CHSH so useful. As an application, we give a single-prover cryptographically sound classical verification protocol for BQP, and we prove its soundness using our CHSH rigidity analysis. Our protocol replicates the functionality of Mahadev’s protocol (FOCS ’18) but with two advantages: (1) the protocol is conceptually intuitive and requires fewer bespoke ingredients, and the soundness analysis is simpler and directly follows the analysis of the nonlocal case, and (2) the soundness analysis does not explicitly use the assumption of a TCF or an adaptive hardcore bit, and only requires QFHE as a black box (though currently the only known constructions of QFHE use TCFs).

The complexity of free games with two or more classical players was essentially settled by Aaronson, Impagliazzo, and Moshkovitz (CCC’14). In the quantum world, there are two complexity classes that can be considered quantum analogues of classical free games: (1) AM*, the multiprover interactive proof class corresponding to free games with entangled players, and, somewhat less obviously, (2) BellQMA(2), the class of quantum Merlin-Arthur proof systems with two unentangled Merlins, whose proof states are separately measured by Arthur. In this work, we make significant progress towards a tight characterization of both of these classes. (1) We show a BellQMA(2) protocol for 3SAT on n variables, where the total amount of communication is Õ(√n). This answers an open question of Chen and Drucker (2010) and also shows, conditional on ETH, that the algorithm of Brandão, Christandl and Yard (STOC’11) for optimizing over separable states is tight up to logarithmic factors. (2) We show that AM* with nprovers = 2, question length O(1), and answer-length log(n) is equal to RE, i.e. that free entangled games with constant-sized questions are as powerful as general entangled games. (In contrast, Aaronson, Impagliazzo and Moshkovitz show that classical free games are much weaker than general classical games.) We show this using a question “hyper-compression” theorem that iteratively applies the introspection technique of Ji et al. (2020). Our result is a significant improvement over the headline result of Ji et al., whose MIP* protocol for the halting problem has (n)-sized questions and answers. (3) By the same techniques, we obtain a zero-gap AM* protocol for a Π2 complete language with constant-size questions and almost logarithmically (O(logn · log* n)) large answers, improving on the headline result of Mousavi, Nezhadi and Yuen (STOC’22). (4) Using a connection to the nonuniform complexity of the halting problem we show that any MIP* protocol for RE requires Ω(logn) bits of communication. It follows that our results in item 3 are optimal up to an O(log* n) factor, and that the gapless compression theorems of Mousavi, Nezhadi and Yuen are asymptotically optimal. We conjecture that these bounds can be saturated in the gapped case as well.

It is a useful fact in classical computer science that many search problems are reducible to decision problems; this has led to decision problems being regarded as the $\textit{de facto}$ computational task to study in complexity theory. In this work, we explore search-to-decision reductions for quantum search problems, wherein a quantum algorithm makes queries to a classical decision oracle to output a desired quantum state. In particular, we focus on search-to-decision reductions for $\mathsf{QMA}$, and show that there exists a quantum polynomial-time algorithm that can generate a witness for a $\mathsf{QMA}$ problem up to inverse polynomial precision by making one query to a $\mathsf{PP}$ decision oracle. We complement this result by showing that $\mathsf{QMA}$-search does $\textit{not}$ reduce to $\mathsf{QMA}$-decision in polynomial-time, relative to a quantum oracle. We also explore the more general $\textit{state synthesis problem}$, in which the goal is to efficiently synthesize a target state by making queries to a classical oracle encoding the state. We prove that there exists a classical oracle with which any quantum state can be synthesized to inverse polynomial precision using only one oracle query and to inverse exponential precision using two oracle queries. This answers an open question of Aaronson from 2016, who presented a state synthesis algorithm that makes $O(n)$ queries to a classical oracle to prepare an $n$-qubit state, and asked if the query complexity could be made sublinear.

A locally testable code is an error-correcting code that admits very efficient probabilistic tests of membership. Tensor codes provide a simple family of combinatorial constructions of locally testable codes that generalize the family of Reed-Muller codes. The natural test for tensor codes, the axis-parallel line vs. point test, plays an essential role in constructions of probabilistically checkable proofs. We analyze the axis-parallel line vs. point test as a two-prover game and show that the test is sound against quantum provers sharing entanglement. Our result implies the quantum-soundness of the low individual degree test, which is an essential component of the MIP* = RE theorem. Our proof also generalizes to the infinite-dimensional commuting-operator model of quantum provers.

We study multiprover interactive proof systems. The power of classical multiprover interactive proof systems, in which the provers do not share entanglement, was characterized in a famous work by Babai, Fortnow, and Lund (Computational Complexity 1991), whose main result was the equality MIP = NEXP. The power of quantum multiprover interactive proof systems, in which the provers are allowed to share entanglement, has proven to be much more difficult to characterize. The best known lower-bound on MIP* is NEXP ⊆ MIP* due to Ito and Vidick (FOCS 2012). As for upper bounds, MIP* could be as large as RE, the class of recursively enumerable languages. The main result of this work is the inclusion NEEXP = NTIME[22poly(n)] ⊆ MIP*. This is an exponential improvement over the prior lower bound and shows that proof systems with entangled provers are at least exponentially more powerful than classical provers. In our protocol the verifier delegates a classical, exponentially large MIP protocol for NEEXP to two entangled provers: the provers obtain their exponentially large questions by measuring their shared state, and use a classical PCP to certify the correctness of their exponentially-long answers. For the soundness of our protocol, it is crucial that each player should not only sample its own question correctly but also avoid performing measurements that would reveal the other player's sampled question. We ensure this by commanding the players to perform a complementary measurement, relying on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to prevent the forbidden measurements from being performed.

Entangled games are a quantum analog of constraint satisfaction problems and have had important applications to quantum complexity theory, quantum cryptography, and the foundations of quantum mechanics. Given a game, the basic computational problem is to compute its entangled value: the supremum success probability attainable by a quantum strategy. We study the complexity of computing the (commuting-operator) entangled value omega^* of entangled XOR games with any number of players. Based on a duality theory for systems of operator equations, we introduce necessary and sufficient criteria for an XOR game to have omega^* = 1, and use these criteria to derive the following results: 1) An algorithm for symmetric games that decides in polynomial time whether omega^* = 1 or omega^* < 1, a task that was not previously known to be decidable, together with a simple tensor-product strategy that achieves value 1 in the former case. The only previous candidate algorithm for this problem was the Navascués-Pironio-Acín (also known as noncommutative Sum of Squares or ncSoS) hierarchy, but no convergence bounds were known. 2) A family of games with three players and with omega^* < 1, where it takes doubly exponential time for the ncSoS algorithm to witness this. By contrast, our algorithm runs in polynomial time. 3) Existence of an unsatisfiable phase for random (non-symmetric) XOR games. We show that there exists a constant C_k^{unsat} depending only on the number k of players, such that a random k-XOR game over an alphabet of size n has omega^* < 1 with high probability when the number of clauses is above C_k^{unsat} n. 4) A lower bound of Omega(n log(n)/log log(n)) on the number of levels in the ncSoS hierarchy required to detect unsatisfiability for most random 3-XOR games. This is in contrast with the classical case where the (3n)^{th} level of the sum-of-squares hierarchy is equivalent to brute-force enumeration of all possible solutions.

The article, published on June 4th, 2018 in the CCC 2018 proceedings, has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the editor(s), and the publisher Schloss Dagstuhl / LIPIcs. The retraction has been agreed due to an error in the proof of the main result. This error is carried over from an error in the referenced paper “Three-player entangled XOR games are NP-hard to approximate” by Thomas Vidick (SICOMP ’16). That paper was used in an essential way to obtain the present result, and the error cannot be addressed through an erratum. See Retraction Notice on the last page of the PDF. We show that it is NP-hard to approximate, to within an additive constant, the maximum success probability of players sharing quantum entanglement in a two-player game with classical questions of logarithmic length and classical answers of constant length. As a corollary, the inclusion NEXP subseteq MIP^*, first shown by Ito and Vidick (FOCS'12) with three provers, holds with two provers only. The proof is based on a simpler, improved analysis of the low-degree test of Raz and Safra (STOC'97) against two entangled provers.

We show that given an explicit description of a multiplayer game, with a classical verifier and a constant number of players, it is QMA-hard, under randomized reductions, to distinguish between the cases when the players have a strategy using entanglement that succeeds with probability 1 in the game, or when no such strategy succeeds with probability larger than 1/2. This proves the “games quantum PCP conjecture” of Fitzsimons and the second author (ITCS'15), albeit under randomized reductions. The core component in our reduction is a construction of a family of two-player games for testing n-qubit maximally entangled states. For any integer n ≥ 2, we give such a game in which questions from the verifier are O(log n) bits long, and answers are poly(loglogn) bits long. We show that for any constant ε ≥ 0, any strategy that succeeds with probability at least 1 - ε in the test must use a state that is within distance δ(ε) = O(εc) from a state that is locally equivalent to a maximally entangled state on n qubits, for some universal constant c > 0. The construction is based on the classical plane-vs-point test for multivariate low-degree polynomials of Raz and Safra (STOC'97). We extend the classical test to the quantum regime by executing independent copies of the test in the generalized Pauli X and Z bases over Fq, where q is a sufficiently large prime power, and combine the two through a test for the Pauli twisted commutation relations. Our main complexity-theoretic result is obtained by combining this family of games with techniques from the classical PCP literature. More specifically, we use constructions of PCPs of proximity introduced by Ben-Sasson et al. (CCC'05), and crucially rely on a linear property of such PCPs. Another consequence of our results is a deterministic reduction from the games quantum PCP conjecture to a suitable formulation of the constraint satisfaction quantum PCP conjecture.

We introduce a simple two-player test which certifies that the players apply tensor products of Pauli σX and σZ observables on the tensor product of n EPR pairs. The test has constant robustness: any strategy achieving success probability within an additive of the optimal must be poly(ε)-close, in the appropriate distance measure, to the honest n-qubit strategy. The test involves 2n-bit questions and 2-bit answers. The key technical ingredient is a quantum version of the classical linearity test of Blum, Luby, and Rubinfeld.

Nash equilibria always exist, but are widely conjectured to require time to find that is exponential in the number of strategies, even for two-player games. By contrast, a simple quasi-polynomial time algorithm, due to Lipton, Markakis and Mehta (LMM), can find approximate Nash equilibria, in which no player can improve their utility by more than epsilon by changing their strategy. The LMM algorithm can also be used to find an approximate Nash equilibrium with near-maximal total welfare. Matching hardness results for this optimization problem re found assuming the hardness of the planted-clique problem (by Hazan and Krauthgamer) and assuming the Exponential Time Hypothesis (by Braverman, Ko and Weinstein). In this paper we consider the application of the sum-squares (SoS) algorithm from convex optimization to the problem of optimizing over Nash equilibria. We show the first unconditional lower bounds on the number of levels of SoS needed to achieve a constant factor approximation to this problem. While it may seem that Nash equilibria do not naturally lend themselves to convex optimization, we also describe a simple LP (linear programming) hierarchy that can find an approximate Nash equilibrium in time comparable to that of the LMM algorithm, although neither algorithm is obviously a generalization of the other. This LP can be viewed as arising from the SoS algorithm at log(n) levels - matching our lower bounds. The lower bounds involve a modification of the Braverman-Ko-Weinstein embedding of CSPs into strategic games and techniques from sum-of-squares proof systems. The upper bound (i.e. analysis of the LP) uses information-theory techniques that have been recently applied to other linear- and semidefinite-programming hierarchies.