Information complexity is one of the most powerful techniques to prove information-theoretical lower bounds, in which Shannon entropy plays a central role. Though Shannon entropy has some convenient properties, such as the chain rule, it still has inherent limitations. One of the most notable barriers is the square-root loss, which appears in the square-root gap between entropy gaps and statistical distances, e.g., Pinsker’s inequality. To bypass this barrier, we introduce a new method based on min-entropy analysis. Building on this new method, we prove the following results. - An Ω(N^{∑_i α_i - max_i {α_i}}/k) randomized communication lower bound of the k-party set-intersection problem where the i-th party holds a random set of size ≈ N^{1-α_i}. - A tight Ω(n/k) randomized lower bound of the k-party Tree Pointer Jumping problems, improving an Ω(n/k²) lower bound by Chakrabarti, Cormode, and McGregor (STOC 08). - An Ω(n/k+√n) lower bound of the Chained Index problem, improving an Ω(n/k²) lower bound by Cormode, Dark, and Konrad (ICALP 19). Since these problems served as hard problems for numerous applications in streaming lower bounds and cryptography, our new lower bounds directly improve these streaming lower bounds and cryptography lower bounds. On the technical side, min-entropy does not have nice properties such as the chain rule. To address this issue, we enhance the structure-vs-pseudorandomness decomposition used by Göös, Pitassi, and Watson (FOCS 17) and Yang and Zhang (STOC 24); both papers used this decomposition to prove communication lower bounds. In this paper, we give a new breath to this method in the multi-party setting, presenting a new toolkit for proving multi-party communication lower bounds.

Program obfuscation aims to hide the inner workings of a program while preserving its functionality. In the quantum setting, recent works have obtained obfuscation schemes for specialized classes of quantum circuits. For instance, Bartusek, Brakerski, and Vaikuntanathan (STOC 2024) constructed a quantum state obfuscation scheme, which supports the obfuscation of quantum programs represented as quantum states for pseudo-deterministic quantum programs with classical inputs and outputs in the classical oracle model. In this work, we improve upon existing results by constructing the first quantum state obfuscation scheme for unitary (or approximately unitary) quantum programs supporting quantum inputs and outputs in the classical oracle model. At the core of our obfuscation scheme are two novel ingredients: a functional quantum authentication scheme that allows key holders to learn specific functions of the authenticated quantum state with simulationbased security, and a compiler that represents an arbitrary quantum circuit as a projective linear-plus-measurement quantum program described by a sequence of non-adaptive Clifford gates interleaved with adaptive and compatible measurements.