Abstract. We give a direct product theorem for the entanglement-assisted interactive quantum communication complexity of an [Formula: see text]-player predicate [Formula: see text]. In particular, we show that for a distribution [Formula: see text] that is product across the input sets of the [Formula: see text] players, the success probability of any entanglement-assisted quantum communication protocol for computing [Formula: see text] copies of [Formula: see text], whose communication is [Formula: see text], goes down exponentially in [Formula: see text]. Here [Formula: see text] is a distributional version of the quantum efficiency or partition bound introduced in [S. Laplante, V. Lerays, and J. Roland, Classical and quantum partition bound and detector inefficiency, in Automata, Languages, and Programming, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012, pp. 617–628], which is a lower bound on the distributional quantum communication complexity of computing a single copy of [Formula: see text] with respect to [Formula: see text]. Applying our direct product theorem for small communication, and techniques related to [Formula: see text], we show that it is possible to do device-independent (DI) quantum cryptography without the assumption that devices do not leak any information. We analyze parallel and sequential versions of the DI quantum key distribution protocol given in [R. Jain, C. A. Miller, and Y. Shi [ IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, 66 (2020), pp. 5567–5584], and show that it is possible to extract [Formula: see text] bits of key from it, even in the presence of [Formula: see text] bits of leakage. Finally, we show that proofs of quantumness with two entangled provers are resistant to leakage, i.e., classical players who communicate [Formula: see text] bits with each other cannot convince the verifier that they share entanglement.

“Non-Malleable Randomness Encoder” (NMRE) was introduced by Kanukurthi et al. (2018) as a useful cryptographic primitive helpful in the construction of non-malleable codes. To the best of our knowledge, their construction is not known to be quantum secure. We provide a construction of a first rate-$1/2$, 2-split, quantum secure NMRE and use this in a black-box manner, to construct the following: 1) rate$1/11$, 3-split, quantum non-malleable code; 2) rate$1/3$, 3-split, quantum secure non-malleable code; and 3) rate$1/5$, 2-split, average case quantum secure non-malleable code.

Non-malleable codes are fundamental objects at the intersection of cryptography and coding theory. These codes provide security guarantees even in settings where error correction and detection are impossible, and have found applications to several other cryptographic tasks. One of the strongest and most well-studied adversarial tampering models is 2-split-state tampering. Here, a codeword is split into two parts which are stored in physically distant servers, and the adversary can then independently tamper with each part using arbitrary functions. This model can be naturally extended to the secret sharing setting with several parties by having the adversary independently tamper with each share. Previous works on non-malleable coding and secret sharing in the split-state tampering model only considered the encoding of classical messages. Furthermore, until recent work by Aggarwal, Boddu, and Jain (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 2024 & arXiv 2022), adversaries with quantum capabilities and shared entanglement had not been considered, and it is a priori not clear whether previous schemes remain secure in this model. In this work, we introduce the notions of split-state non-malleable codes and secret sharing schemes for quantum messages secure against quantum adversaries with shared entanglement. Then, we present explicit constructions of such schemes that achieve low-error non-malleability. More precisely, for some constant$c\gt 0$, we construct efficiently encodable and decodable split-state non-malleable codes and secret sharing schemes for quantum messages preserving entanglement with external systems and achieving security against quantum adversaries having shared entanglement with codeword length n, any message length at most$n^{c}$, and error$\varepsilon =2^{-{n^{c}}}$. In the easier setting of average-case non-malleability, we achieve efficient non-malleable coding with rate close to$1/11$.

One-way state generators (OWSG) [1] are natural quantum analogs to classical one-way functions. We consider statistically-verifiable OWSGs (sv-OWSG), which are potentially weaker objects than OWSGs. We show that$O\left(\frac{n}{\log (n)}\right)$-copy sv-OWSGs ($n$represents the input length) are equivalent to$poly (n)$-copy sv-OWSGs and to quantum commitments. Since known results show that$o\left(\frac{n}{\log (n)}\right)$-copy OWSGs cannot imply commitments [2], this shows that$O\left(\frac{n}{\log(n)}\right)$-copy sv-OWSGs are the weakest OWSGs from which we can get commitments (and hence much of quantum cryptography). Our construction follows along the lines of Hastad, Impagliazzo, Levin and Luby [3], who obtained classical pseudorandom generators (PRG) from classical one-way functions (OWF), however with crucial modifications. Our construction, when applied to the classical case, provides an alternative to the construction provided by [3] to obtain a classical mildly non-uniform PRG from any classical OWF. Since we do not argue conditioned on the output$f(x)$, our construction and analysis is arguably simpler and may be of independent interest. For converting a mildly non-uniform PRG to a uniform PRG, we can use the same construction as [3].

Characterizing the minimal communication needed for quantum channel simulation is a fundamental task in the quantum information theory. In this paper, we show that, in fidelity, the quantum channel simulation can be directly achieved via quantum state splitting without using a technique known as the de Finetti reduction, and thus provide a pair of tighter one-shot bounds. This opens up new potentials for higher-order analysis. Using the bounds, we also recover the quantum reverse Shannon theorem in a much simpler way.

We show an area law in the mutual information for the maximally-mixed state Ω in the ground space of general Hamiltonians, which is independent of the underlying ground space degeneracy. Our result assumes the existence of a ‘good’ approximation to the ground state projector (a good AGSP), a crucial ingredient in former area-law proofs. Such approximations have been explicitly derived for 1D gapped local Hamiltonians and 2D frustration-free locally-gapped local Hamiltonians. As a corollary, we show that in 1D gapped local Hamiltonians, for any є>0 and any bi-partition L∪ Lc of the system,

Non-malleable codes introduced by Dziembowski, Pietrzak and Wichs [1] encode a classical messageSin a manner such that the tampered codeword either decodes to the original messageSor a message that is unrelated/independent ofS. Constructing non-malleable codes for various tampering function families has received significant attention in the recent years. We consider the well studied (2-part)split-statemodel, in which the messageSis encoded into two partsXandY, and the adversary is allowed to arbitrarily tamper with eachXandYindividually. Non-malleable codes in the split-state model have found applications in other important security notions likenon-malleable commitmentsandnon-malleable secret sharing. Thus, it is vital to understand if such non-malleable codes are secure against quantum adversaries. We consider the security of non-malleable codes in the split-state model when the adversary is allowed to make use of arbitrary entanglement to tamper the partsXandY. We construct explicit quantum secure non-malleable codes in the split-state model. Our construction of quantum secure non-malleable codes is based on the recent construction of quantum secure 2-source non-malleable extractorsby Boddu, Jain and Kapshikar [2]. • We extend the connection of Cheraghchi and Guruswami [3] between 2-source non-malleable extractors and non-malleable codes in the split-state model in the classical setting to the quantum setting, i.e. we show that explicit quantum secure 2-source non-malleable extractors in (k1,k2)-qpa-state framework of [2] give rise to explicit quantum secure non-malleable codes in the split-state model. • We construct the first quantum secure non-malleable code with efficient encoding and decoding procedures for message lengthm=nΩ(1), error ε = 2-nΩ(1)and codeword of size 2n. Prior to this work, it remained open to provide such quantum secure non-malleable code even for a single bit message in the split-state model. • We also study its natural extension when the tampering of the codeword is performedt-times. We construct quantum secure one-many non-malleable code with efficient encoding and decoding procedures fort=nΩ(1), message lengthm=nΩ(1), error ε = 2-nΩ(1)and codeword of size 2n. • As an application, we also construct the first quantum secure 2-out-of-2 non-malleable secret sharing scheme for message/secret lengthm=nΩ(1), error ε = 2-nΩ(1)and share of sizen.

Multi-source extractors are functions that extract uniform randomness from multiple (weak) sources of randomness. Quantum multi-source extractors were considered by Kasher and Kempe (2010) (for the quantum independent adversary and the quantum bounded storage adversary), Chung et al. (2014) (for the general entangled adversary) and Arnon-Friedman et al. (2016) (for the quantum Markov adversary). One of the main objectives of this work is to unify all the existing quantum multi-source adversary models. We propose two new models of adversaries: 1) the quantum measurement adversary ($\mathsf {qma}$), which generates side information using entanglement and on post-measurement; and 2) the quantum communication adversary ($\mathsf {qca}$), which generates side information using entanglement and communication between multiple sources. We show that: 1)$\mathsf {qma}$is the strongest adversary among all the known adversaries, in the sense that the side information of all other adversaries can be generated by$\mathsf {qma}$; 2) The (generalized) inner-product function (in fact a general class of two-wise independent functions) continues to work as a good extractor with matching parameters as that of Chor and Goldreich (1985) against classical adversaries; 3) A non-malleable extractor proposed by Li (2012) (against classical adversaries) continues to be secure against quantum side information. This result implies a non-malleable extractor result of Aggarwal et al. (2019) with uniform seed. We strengthen their result via a completely different proof to make the non-malleable extractor of Li secure against quantum side information even when the seed is not uniform; 4) A modification (working with weak local randomness instead of uniform local randomness) of the Dodis and Wichs (2009) protocol for privacy-amplification is secure against active quantum adversaries (those who arbitrarily modify the messages exchanged in the protocol). This strengthens on a recent result due to Aggarwal et al. (2019) which uses uniform local randomness; 5) A tight efficiency lower bound for the (generalized) inner-product function (in fact a general class of two-wise independent functions).

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 an optimal characterization of the resources required for one-shot quantum state redistribution, an important open problem in quantum Shannon theory.

We prove a direct product theorem for the one-way entanglement-assisted quantum communication complexity of a general relation $f\subseteq\mathcal{X}\times\mathcal{Y}\times\mathcal{Z}$. For any $\varepsilon, ζ> 0$ and any $k\geq1$, we show that \[ \mathrm{Q}^1_{1-(1-\varepsilon)^{Ω(ζ^6k/\log|\mathcal{Z}|)}}(f^k) = Ω\left(k\left(ζ^5\cdot\mathrm{Q}^1_{\varepsilon + 12ζ}(f) - \log\log(1/ζ)\right)\right),\] where $\mathrm{Q}^1_{\varepsilon}(f)$ represents the one-way entanglement-assisted quantum communication complexity of $f$ with worst-case error $\varepsilon$ and $f^k$ denotes $k$ parallel instances of $f$. As far as we are aware, this is the first direct product theorem for quantum communication. Our techniques are inspired by the parallel repetition theorems for the entangled value of two-player non-local games, under product distributions due to Jain, Pereszlényi and Yao, and under anchored distributions due to Bavarian, Vidick and Yuen, as well as message-compression for quantum protocols due to Jain, Radhakrishnan and Sen. Our techniques also work for entangled non-local games which have input distributions anchored on any one side. In particular, we show that for any game $G = (q, \mathcal{X}\times\mathcal{Y}, \mathcal{A}\times\mathcal{B}, \mathsf{V})$ where $q$ is a distribution on $\mathcal{X}\times\mathcal{Y}$ anchored on any one side with anchoring probability $ζ$, then \[ ω^*(G^k) = \left(1 - (1-ω^*(G))^5\right)^{Ω\left(\frac{ζ^2 k}{\log(|\mathcal{A}|\cdot|\mathcal{B}|)}\right)}\] where $ω^*(G)$ represents the entangled value of the game $G$. This is a generalization of the result of Bavarian, Vidick and Yuen, who proved a parallel repetition theorem for games anchored on both sides, and potentially a simplification of their proof.

We give a direct product theorem for the entanglement-assisted interactive quantum communication complexity in terms of the quantum partition bound for product distributions. The quantum partition or efficiency bound is a lower bound on communication complexity, a non-distributional version of which was introduced by Laplante, Lerays and Roland (2012). For a two-input boolean function, the best result for interactive quantum communication complexity known previously was due to Sherstov (2018), who showed a direct product theorem in terms of the generalized discrepancy. While there is no direct relationship between the maximum distributional quantum partition bound for product distributions, and the generalized discrepancy method, unlike Sherstov's result, our result works for two-input functions or relations whose outputs are non-boolean as well. As an application of our result, we show that it is possible to do device-independent quantum key distribution (DIQKD) without the assumption that devices do not leak any information after inputs are provided to them. We analyze the DIQKD protocol given by Jain, Miller and Shi (2020), and show that when the protocol is carried out with devices that are compatible with several copies of the Magic Square game, it is possible to extract a linear (in the number of copies of the game) amount of key from it, even in the presence of a linear amount of leakage. Our security proof is parallel, i.e., the honest parties can enter all their inputs into their devices at once, and works for a leakage model that is arbitrarily interactive, i.e., the devices of the honest parties Alice and Bob can exchange information with each other and with the eavesdropper Eve in any number of rounds, as long as the total number of bits or qubits communicated is bounded.

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 one-shot 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. A full version of this paper is accessible at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.08753.pdf

We show some chain-rules for the capacity11In some sense, the maximum amount of information that can be conveyed through the channel. of classical-quantum and quantum channels. We use the concept of Nash-Equilibrium in game-theory, and its existence in suitably defined games, to arrive at the chain-rules.

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.

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 N, 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 Hayden and Penington, 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.

A prominent application of quantum cryptography is the distribution of cryptographic keys that are provably secure. Such security proofs were extended by Vazirani and Vidick (Physical Review Letters, 113, 140501, 2014) to the deviceindependent (DI) scenario, where the users do not need to trust the integrity of the underlying quantum devices. The protocols analyzed by them and by subsequent authors all require a sequential execution of N multiplayer games, where N is the security parameter. In this work, we prove the security of a protocol where all games are executed in parallel. Besides decreasing the number of time-steps necessary for key generation, this result reduces the security requirements for DI-QKD by allowing arbitrary information leakage of each user's inputs within his or her lab. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first parallel security proof for a fully device-independent QKD protocol. Our protocol tolerates a constant level of device imprecision and achieves a linear key rate.

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 bits and qubits. This problem was studied in the asymptotic regime for a memoryless channel where 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 shifting the classical private rate to the quantum information rate leads to a rate region for simultaneous 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.

Smooth entropies are a tool for quantifying resource trade-offs in information theory and cryptography. However, in typical multi-partite problems 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. As a consequence, we can derive 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.

A 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 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 study the problem of communication over a compound quantum channel in the presence of entanglement. Classically, such a channel is modeled as a collection of conditional probability distributions wherein neither the sender nor the receiver is aware of the channel being used for transmission, except for the fact that it belongs to this collection. We provide near optimal achievability and converse bounds for this problem in the one-shot quantum setting in terms of the quantum hypothesis testing divergence. We also consider the case of informed sender, showing a one-shot achievability result that converges appropriately in the asymptotic and independent and identically distributed setting. Our achievability proof is similar in spirit to its classical counterpart. To arrive at our result, we use the technique of position-based decoding along with a new approach for constructing a union of two projectors, which might be of independent interest. We give another application of the union of projectors to the problem of testing composite quantum hypotheses.

This paper concerns the problem of quantum measurement compression with side information in the one-shot setting with shared-randomness. In this problem, Alice shares a pure quantum state with Bob and the reference system. She performs a measurement on her registers and wishes to communicate the outcome to Bob using shared-randomness and classical communication. The outcome that Bob receives must be correctly correlated with the reference system and his own registers. Our goal is to concurrently minimize the classical communication and shared-randomness cost. The suggested protocol presented in this paper is based on convex-split and position based decoding. The communication is upper bounded in terms of smooth max and hypothesis testing relative entropies. A second protocol addresses the task of strong randomness extraction in the presence of quantum side information. The protocol provides an error guarantee in terms of relative entropy (as opposed to trace distance) and extracts close to the optimal number of uniform bits. As an application, we provide a 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. The result achieves the optimal number of bits communicated and the required number of bits of shared-randomness, for the same task in the asymptotic and i.i.d. setting.

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 [1] 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 study the problem of communication over compound quantum channel in the presence of entanglement. Classically such channels are modeled as a collection of conditional probability distributions wherein neither the sender nor the receiver is aware of the channel being used for transmission, except for the fact that it belongs to this collection. We provide achievability and converse bounds for this problem in the one shot quantum setting in terms of quantum hypothesis testing relative-entropy. Our achievability proof is similar in spirit to its classical counterpart. To arrive at our result, we use the technique of position based decoding along with a new approach for constructing a union of two projectors, which can be of independent interest.

We aim to study the optimal rates of transmission of public and private classical information over a quantum channel in the most general channel model. To this end, we discuss a scenario in which a quantum channel is being used only once, i.e., one-shot regime is considered. A quantum channel can be used to send classical information (bits) either publicly or privately and for either case, one-shot bounds have been reported in the literature. This paper investigates the one-shot capacity capabilities of a quantum channel for simultaneous transmission of public and private information. We derive an achievable rate region in the form of a tradeoff between public and private rates. We also provide converse bounds assessing the tightness of our achievable rates. Our main tools used in the achievability proofs are position-based decoding and convex-split lemma.

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 et al. (2016).

In this paper, we consider a quantum generalization of the task considered by Slepian and Wolf regarding distributed source compression. In our task, Alice, Bob, Charlie, and Reference share a joint pure state. Alice and Bob wish to send a part of their respective systems to Charlie without collaborating with each other. We give achievability bounds for this task in the one-shot setting and provide the asymptotic and independent identically distributed analysis in the case when there is no side information with Charlie. Our result implies the result of Abeyesinghe et al., who studied a special case of this problem. As another special case wherein Bob holds trivial registers, we recover the result of Devetak and Yard regarding quantum state redistribution.

One of the best lower bound methods for the quantum communication complexity of a function H (with or without shared entanglement) is the logarithm of the approximate rank of the communication matrix of H. This measure is essentially equivalent to the approximate gamma-2 norm and generalized discrepancy, and subsumes several other lower bounds. All known lower bounds on quantum communication complexity in the general unbounded-round model can be shown via the logarithm of approximate rank, and it was an open problem to give any separation at all between quantum communication complexity and the logarithm of the approximate rank. In this work we provide the first such separation: We exhibit a total function H with quantum communication complexity almost quadratically larger than the logarithm of its approximate rank. We construct H using the communication lookup function framework of Anshu et al. (FOCS 2016) based on the cheat sheet framework of Aaronson et al. (STOC 2016). From a starting function F, this framework defines a new function H=F_G. Our main technical result is a lower bound on the quantum communication complexity of F_G in terms of the discrepancy of F, which we do via quantum information theoretic arguments. We show the upper bound on the approximate rank of F_G by relating it to the Boolean circuit size of the starting function F.

Let the randomized query complexity of a relation for error probability epsilon be denoted by R_epsilon(). We prove that for any relation f contained in {0,1}^n times R and Boolean function g:{0,1}^m -> {0,1}, R_{1/3}(f o g^n) = Omega(R_{4/9}(f).R_{1/2-1/n^4}(g)), where f o g^n is the relation obtained by composing f and g. We also show using an XOR lemma that R_{1/3}(f o (g^{xor}_{O(log n)})^n) = Omega(log n . R_{4/9}(f) . R_{1/3}(g))$, where g^{xor}_{O(log n)} is the function obtained by composing the XOR function on O(log n) bits and g.

Quantum state redistribution is a fundamental quantum information theoretic primitive that captures a generic quantum communication scenario. In this work, we study the problem of entanglement assisted quantum state redistribution in one-shot setting and provide a new achievability result on the quantum communication required. Our bounds are in terms of max relative entropy and Rényi relative entropy of order 2. We show that our result is upper bounded by the result obtained in Berta, Christandl, Touchette (2016) (which is in terms of smooth conditional max and min entropies). We use the techniques of convex split and position based decoding (through pretty good measurement) to arrive at our result. Furthermore, in order to clarify the connection between our result and other recent results that use convex split and position based decoding, we prove a new relation between the hypothesis testing relative entropy and Rényi relative entropy of order 2.

While exponential separations are known between quantum and randomized communication complexity for partial functions (Raz, STOC 1999), the best known separation between these measures for a total function is quadratic, witnessed by the disjointness function. We give the first super-quadratic separation between quantum and randomized communication complexity for a total function, giving an example exhibiting a power 2.5 gap. We further present a 1.5 power separation between exact quantum and randomized communication complexity, improving on the previous ≅ 1.15 separation by Ambainis (STOC 2013). Finally, we present a nearly optimal quadratic separation between randomized communication complexity and the logarithm of the partition number, improving upon the previous best power 1.5 separation due to Goos, Jayram, Pitassi, and Watson. Our results are the communication analogues of separations in query complexity proved using the recent cheat sheet framework of Aaronson, Ben-David, and Kothari (STOC 2016). Our main technical results are randomized communication and information complexity lower bounds for a family of functions, called lookup functions, that generalize and port the cheat sheet framework to communication complexity.

We exhibit an $n$-node graph whose independent set polytope requires extended formulations of size exponential in $\Omega(n/\log n)$. Previously, no explicit examples of $n$-dimensional $0/1$-polytopes were known with extension complexity larger than exponential in $\Theta(\sqrt{n})$. Our construction is inspired by a relatively little-known connection between extended formulations and (monotone) circuit depth.

Let f: {0,1}^n*{0,1}^n -> {0,1} be a 2-party function. For every product distribution mu on {0,1}^n*{0,1}^n, we show that CC^{mu}_{0.49}(f) = O(log(prt_{1/8}(f))*log(log(prt_{1/8}(f)))^2), where CC^{mu}_{epsilon}(f) is the distributional communication complexity of f with error at most epsilon under the distribution mu and prt_{1/8}(f) is the partition bound of f, as defined by Jain and Klauck [Proc. 25th CCC, 2010]. We also prove a similar bound in terms of IC_{1/8}(f), the information complexity of f, namely, CC^{mu}_{0.49}(f) = O((IC_{1/8}(f)*log(IC_{1/8}(f)))^2). The latter bound was recently and independently established by Kol [Proc. 48th STOC, 2016] using a different technique. We show a similar result for query complexity under product distributions. Let g: {0,1}^n -> {0,1} be a function. For every bit-wise product distribution mu on {0,1}^n, we show that QC^{mu}_{0.49}(g) = O((log(qprt_{1/8}(g))*log(log(qprt_{1/8}(g))))^2), where QC^{mu}_{epsilon}(g) is the distributional query complexity of f with error at most epsilon under the distribution mu and qprt_{1/8}(g) is the query partition bound of the function g. Partition bounds were introduced (in both communication complexity and query complexity models) to provide LP-based lower bounds for randomized communication complexity and randomized query complexity. Our results demonstrate that these lower bounds are polynomially tight for product distributions.

In this paper, we present the following quantum compression protocol `P': Let ρ,σ be quantum states, such that S (ρ∥σ)def= Tr(ρ log ρ - ρ log σ), the relative entropy between ρ and σ, is finite. Alice gets to know the eigendecomposition of ρ. Bob gets to know the eigendecomposition 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 O((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 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? 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 et al.. We also present a variant of protocol? 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 analog of the widely used classical correlated-sampling protocol. For example, Holenstein used the classical correlated-sampling protocol in his proof of a parallel-repetition theorem for two-player one-round games.

We show two new direct product results in two different models of communication complexity. Our first result is in the one-way public-coin model. Let f ⊆ X × Y × Z be a relation and ϵ > 0 be a constant. Let R 1,pub ϵ ( f ) represent the communication complexity of f , with worst-case error ϵ in this model. We show that if for computing f k ( k independent copies of f ) in this model, o ( k ċ R 1, pub 1/3 ( f )) communication is used, then the success is exponentially small in k . We show a new tight characterization of communication complexity in this model which strengthens the tight characterization shown in Jain et al. [2008]. We use this new characterization to show our direct product result and this characterization may also be of independent interest. Our second direct product result is in the model of two-way public-coin communication complexity. We show a direct product result for all relations in this model in terms of a new complexity measure that we define. Our new measure is a generalization to nonproduct distributions, of the two-way product subdistribution bound of Jain et al. [2008]. Our direct product result therefore generalizes to nonproduct distributions, their direct product result in terms of the two-way product subdistribution bound. As an application of our new direct product result, we reproduce (via completely different arguments) strong direct product result for the set-disjointness problem which was previously shown by Klauck [2010]. We show this by proving that our new complexity measure gives a tight lower bound of Ω( n ) for the set-disjointness problem on n -bit inputs (this strengthens the linear lower bound on the rectangle/corruption bound for set-disjointness shown by Razborov [1992]). In addition, we show that many previously known direct product results in this model are uniformly implied and often strengthened by our result.

We consider unidirectional data streams with restricted access, such as read-only and write-only streams. For read-write streams, we also introduce a new complexity measure called expansion, the ratio between the space used on the stream and the input size. We give tight bounds for the complexity of reversing a stream of length n in several of the possible models. In the read-only and write-only model, we show that p-pass algorithms need memory space Theta(n/p). But if either the output stream or the input stream is read-write, then the complexity falls to Theta(n/p^2). It becomes polylog(n) if p = O(log n) and both streams are read-write. We also study the complexity of sorting a stream and give two algorithms with small expansion. Our main sorting algorithm is randomized and has O(1) expansion, O(log n) passes and O(log n) memory.

We show a parallel repetition theorem for the entangled value ω*(G) of any two-player one-round game G where the questions (x, y) ∈ X × Y to Alice and Bob are drawn from a product distribution on X × Y. We show that for the k-fold product Gkof the game G (which represents the game G played in parallel k times independently) ω*(Gk) = (1 - (1 - ω*(G))3)Ω(k/Iog(|A|·|B|)where A and B represent the sets from which the answers of Alice and Bob are drawn. The arguments we use are information theoretic and are broadly on similar lines as that of Raz [1] and Holenstein [2] for classical games. The additional quantum ingredients we need, to deal with entangled games, are inspired by the work of Jain, Radhakrishnan, and Sen [3], where quantum information theoretic arguments were used to achieve message compression in quantum communication protocols.

We show an Ω(√n/T) lower bound for the space required by any unidirectional constant-error randomized T-pass streaming algorithm that recognizes whether an expression over two types of parenthesis is well parenthesized. This proves a conjecture due to Magniez, Mathieu, and Nayak (2009) and rigorously establishes that bidirectional streams are exponentially more efficient in space usage as compared with unidirectional ones. We obtain the lower bound by analyzing the information that is necessarily revealed by the players about their respective inputs in a two-party communication protocol for a variant of the index function, namely augmented index. We show that in any communication protocol that computes this function correctly with constant error on the uniform distribution (a “hard” distribution), either Alice reveals Ω(n) information about her n-bit input, or Bob reveals Ω(1) information about his (logn)-bit input, even when the inputs are drawn from an “easy” distribution, the uniform distribution over inputs that evaluate to 0. The information cost tradeoff is obtained by a novel application of the conceptually simple and familiar ideas, such as average encoding and the cut-and-paste property, of randomized protocols. Motivated by recent examples of exponential savings in space by streaming quantum algorithms, we also study quantum protocols for augmented index. Defining an appropriate notion of information cost for quantum protocols involves a delicate balancing act between its applicability and the ease with which we can analyze it. We define a notion of quantum information cost, which reflects some of the nonintuitive properties of quantum information. We show that in quantum protocols that compute the augmented index function correctly with constant error on the uniform distribution, either Alice reveals Ω(n/t) information about her n-bit input, or Bob reveals Ω(1/t) information about his (log n)-bit input, where t is the number of messages in the protocol, even when the inputs are drawn from the abovementioned easy distribution. While this tradeoff demonstrates the strength of our proof techniques, it does not lead to a space lower bound for checking parentheses. We leave such an implication for quantum streaming algorithms as an intriguing open question.

The main result of this paper is an optimal strong direct product result for the two-party public-coin randomized communication complexity of the Tribes function. This is proved by providing an alternate proof of the optimal lower bound of \Omega(n) for the randomised communication complexity of the Tribes function using the so-called smooth-rectangle bound, introduced by Jain and Klauck [JK10]. The optimal \Omega(n) lower bound for Tribes was originally proved by Jayram, Kumar and Sivakumar [JKS03], using a more powerful lower bound technique, namely the information complexity bound. The information complexity bound is known to be at least as strong a lower bound method as the smooth-rectangle bound [KLL+12]. On the other hand, we are not aware of any function or relation for which the smooth-rectangle bound is (asymptotically) smaller than its public-coin randomized communication complexity. The optimal direct product for Tribes is obtained by combining our smooth-rectangle bound for tribes with the strong direct product result of Jain and Yao [JY12] in terms of smooth-rectangle bound.

We investigate the fundamental problem of generating bipartite classical distributions or quantum states. By designing efficient communication protocols and proving their optimality, we establish a number of intriguing connections to fundamental measures in optimization, convex geometry, and information theory. 1. To generate a classical distribution P(x, y), we tightly characterize the minimum amount of quantum communication needed by the psd-rank of P (as a matrix), a measure recently proposed by Fiorini, Massar, Pokutta, Tiwary and de Wolf (Proceedings of the 44th A CM Symposium on Theory of Computing, pages 95–106, 2012) in studies of the minimum size of extended formulations of optimization problems such as TSP. This echos the previous characterization for the optimal classical communication cost by the nonnegative rank of P. The result is obtained via investigating the more general case of bipartite quantum state generation and designing an optimal protocol for it. 2. When an approximation of ε is allowed to generate a distribution (X, Y) ∼ P, we present a classical protocol of the communication cost O((C(X, Y) + 1)/ε), where C(X, Y) is common information, a well-studied measure in information theory introduced by Wyner (IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 21(2):163–179, 1975). This also links nonnegative rank and common information, two seemingly unrelated quantities in different fields. 3. For approximately generating a quantum pure state |ψ〉, we completely characterize the minimum cost by a corresponding approximate rank, closing a possibly exponential gap left in Ambainis, Schulman, Ta-Shma, Vazirani and Wigderson (SIAM Journal on Computing, 32(6):1570–1585, 2003).

We investigate the fundamental problem of generating bipartite classical distributions or quantum states. By designing efficient communication protocols and proving their optimality, we establish a number of intriguing connections to fundamental measures in optimization, convex geometry, and information theory. 1) To generate a classical distribution P(x,y), we tightly characterize the minimum amount of quantum communication needed by the psd-rank of P (as a matrix), a measure recently proposed by Fiorini et al. (Proc. 44th ACM Symp. Theory Comput., pp. 95-106, 2012) in studies of the minimum size of extended formulations of optimization problems such as TSP. This echos the previous characterization for the optimal classical communication cost by the nonnegative rank of P. The result is obtained via investigating the more general case of bipartite quantum state generation and designing an optimal protocol for it. 2) When an approximation ϵ is allowed to generate a distribution (X,Y)~P, we present a classical protocol of the communication cost O((C(X,Y)+1)/ϵ, where C(X,Y) is common information, a well-studied measure in information theory introduced by Wyner (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, 21 (2):163-179, 1975). This also links nonnegative rank and common information, two seemingly unrelated quantities in different fields. 3) For approximately generating a quantum pure state |ψ〉, we completely characterize the minimum cost by a corresponding approximate rank, closing a possibly exponential gap left in Ambainis etal. (SIAM J. Comput., 32 (6):1570-1585, 2003).

A strong direct product theorem for a problem in a given model of computation states that, in order to compute k instances of the problem, if we provide resource which is less than k times the resource required for computing one instance of the problem with constant success probability, then the probability of correctly computing all the k instances together, is exponentially small in k. In this paper, we consider the model of two-party bounded-round public-coin randomized communication complexity. We show a direct product theorem for the communication complexity of any relation in this model. In particular, our result implies a strong direct product theorem for the two-party constant-message public-coin randomized communication complexity of all relations. As an immediate application of our result, we get a strong direct product theorem for the pointer chasing problem. This problem has been well studied for understanding round v/s communication trade-offs in both classical and quantum communication protocols. Our result generalizes the result of Jain [2011] which can be regarded as the special case when t=1. Our result can be considered as an important progress towards settling the strong direct product conjecture for the two-party public-coin communication complexity, a major open question in this area. We show our result using information theoretic arguments. Our arguments and techniques build on the ones used in Jain~\cite{Jain:2011}. %, where a strong direct product theorem for the %two-party one-way public-coin communication complexity of all %relations is shown (that is the special case of our result when $t=1$). One key tool used in our work and also in Jain~\cite{Jain:2011} is a message compression technique due to Braver man and Rao~\cite{Braverman2011}, who used it to show a {\em direct sum} theorem in the same model of communication complexity as considered by us. Another important tool that we use is a correlated sampling protocol, which for example, has been used in Holenstein~\cite{Holenstein2007} for proving a parallel repetition theorem for two-prover games.

The Quantum Substate Theorem due to Jain (2002) gives us a powerful operational interpretation of relative entropy, in fact, of the observational divergence of two quantum states, a quantity that is related to their relative entropy. Informally, the theorem states that if the observational divergence between two quantum states ρ, σ is small, then there is a quantum state ρ'close to ρ in trace distance, such that ρ'when scaled down by a small factor becomes a substate of σ. We present new proofs of this theorem. The resulting statement is optimal up to a constant factor in its dependence on observational divergence. In addition, the proofs are both conceptually simpler and significantly shorter than the earlier proof.

Positive semi definite programs are an important subclass of semi definite programs in which all matrices involved in the specification of the problem are positive semi definite and all scalars involved are non-negative. We present a parallel algorithm, which given an instance of a positive semi definite program of size N and an approximation factor ε >; 0, runs in (parallel) time poly(1/ε)·polylog(N), using poly(N) processors, and outputs a value which is within multiplicative factor of (1+ε) to the optimal. Our result generalizes analogous result of Luby and Nisan (1993) for positive linear programs and our algorithm is inspired by their algorithm of [10].

This work considers the quantum interactive proof system model of computation, which is the (classical) interactive proof system model’s natural quantum computational analogue. An exact characterization of the expressive power of quantum interactive proof systems is obtained: the collection of computational problems having quantum interactive proof systems consists precisely of those problems solvable by deterministic Turing machines that use at most a polynomial amount of space (or, more succinctly, QIP = PSPACE). This characterization is proved through the use of a parallelized form of the matrix multiplicative weights update method, applied to a class of semidefinite programs that captures the computational power of quantum interactive proof systems. One striking implication of this characterization is that quantum computing provides no increase in computational power whatsoever over classical computing in the context of interactive proof systems, for it is well known that the collection of computational problems having classical interactive proof systems coincides with those problems solvable by polynomial-space computations.

We describe new lower bounds for randomized communication complexity and query complexity which we call the partition bounds. They are expressed as the optimum value of linear programs. For communication complexity we show that the partition bound is stronger than both the rectangle/corruption bound and the γ2/generalized discrepancy bounds. In the model of query complexity we show that the partition bound is stronger than the approximate polynomial degree and classical adversary bounds. We also exhibit an example where the partition bound is quadratically larger than the approximate polynomial degree and adversary bounds.

We prove that the complexity class QIP, which consists of all problems having quantum interactive proof systems, is contained in PSPACE. This containment is proved by applying a parallelized form of the matrix multiplicative weights update method to a class of semidefinite programs that captures the computational power of quantum interactive proofs. As the containment of PSPACE in QIP follows immediately from the well-known equality IP = PSPACE, the equality QIP = PSPACE follows.

The notion of divergence information of an ensemble of probability distributions was introduced by Jain, Radhakrishnan and Sen in Jain et al. (2002; 2009) in the context of the ‘substate theorem’. Since then, divergence has been recognised as a more natural measure of information in several situations in both quantum and classical communication. We construct ensembles of probability distributions for which divergence information may be significantly smaller than the more standard Holevo information. As a result, we establish that bounds previously shown for Holevo information are weaker than similar ones shown for divergence information.

Consider the following simultaneous message passing (SMP) model for computing a relation f sube X times Y times Z. In this model Alice, on input x isin X and Bob, on input y isin Y, send one message each to a third party Referee who then outputs a z isin Z such that (x, y, z) isin f. We first show optimal direct sum results for all relations / in this model, both in the quantum and classical settings, in the situation where we allow shared resources (shared entanglement in quantum protocols and public coins in classical protocols) between Alice and Referee and Bob and Referee and no shared resource between Alice and Bob. This implies that, in this model, the communication required to compute k simultaneous instances of /, with constant success overall, is at least k-times the communication required to compute one instance with constant success. This in particular implies an earlier direct sum result, shown by Chakrabarti, Shi, Wirth and Yao [CSWY01] for the equality function (and a class of other so-called robust functions), in the classical SMP model with no shared resources between any parties. Furthermore we investigate the gap between the SMP model and the one-way model in communication complexity and exhibit a partial function that is exponentially more expensive in the former if quantum communication with entanglement is allowed, compared to the latter even in the deterministic case.

This paper studies a simple class of zero-sum games played by two competing quantum players: each player sends a mixed quantum state to a referee, who performs a joint measurement on the two states to determine the players' payoffs. We prove that an equilibrium point of any such game can be approximated by means of an efficient parallel algorithm, which implies that one-turn quantum refereed games, wherein the referee is specified by a quantum circuit, can be simulated in polynomial space.

We prove that QIP(2), the class of problems having two-message quantum interactive proof systems, is a subset of PSPACE. This relationship is obtained by means of an efficient parallel algorithm, based on the matrix multiplicative weights update method, for approximately solving a certain class of semidefinite programs.

We prove the following information-theoretic property about quantum states. Substate theorem: Let ρ and σ be quantum states in the same Hilbert space with relative entropy S (ρ ‖ σ) ≔ Tr ρ (log ρ - log σ) = c . Then for all ϵ > 0, there is a state ρ′ such that the trace distance ‖ρ′ - ρ‖ tr : Tr √(ρ′ - ρ) 2 ≤ ϵ, and ρ′/2 O ( c /ϵ 2 ) ≤ σ. It states that if the relative entropy of ρ and σ is small, then there is a state ρ′ close to ρ, i.e. with small trace distance ‖ρ′ - ρ‖ tr , that when scaled down by a factor 2 O ( c ) ‘sits inside’, or becomes a ‘substate’ of, σ. This result has several applications in quantum communication complexity and cryptography. Using the substate theorem, we derive a privacy trade-off for the set membership problem in the two-party quantum communication model. Here Alice is given a subset A ⊆ [ n ], Bob an input i ∈ [ n ], and they need to determine if i ∈ A . Privacy trade-off for set membership: In any two-party quantum communication protocol for the set membership problem, if Bob reveals only k bits of information about his input, then Alice must reveal at least n /2 O( k ) bits of information about her input. We also discuss relationships between various information theoretic quantities that arise naturally in the context of the substate theorem.

A basic question in complexity theory is whether the computational resources required for solving k independent instances of the same problem scale as k times the resources required for one instance. We investigate this question in various models of classical communication complexity. We introduce a new measure, the subdistribution bound , which is a relaxation of the well-studied rectangle or corruption bound in communication complexity. We nonetheless show that for the communication complexity of Boolean functions with constant error, the subdistribution bound is the same as the latter measure, up to a constant factor. We prove that the one-way version of this bound tightly captures the one-way public-coin randomized communication complexity of any relation, and the two-way version bounds the two-way public-coin randomized communication complexity from below. More importantly, we show that the bound satisfies the strong direct product property under product distributions for both one- and two-way protocols, and the weak direct product property under arbitrary distributions for two-way protocols. These results subsume and strengthen, in a unified manner, several recent results on the direct product question. The simplicity and broad applicability of our technique is perhaps an indication of its potential to solve yet more challenging questions regarding the direct product problem.

LetXandYbe finite nonempty sets and(X,Y) a pair of random variables taking values inX?Y. We consider communication protocols between two parties,AliceandBob, for generatingXandY.Aliceis provided anx?Xgenerated according to the distribution ofX, and is required to send a message toBobin order to enable him to generatey?Y, whose distribution is the same as that ofY|X=x. Both parties have access to a shared random string generated in advance. LetT[X:Y] be the minimum (over all protocols) of the expected number of bitsAliceneeds to transmit to achieve this. We show that I[X:Y] ? T[X:Y] ? I [X:Y] + 2 log2(I[X:Y]+ O(1). We also consider the worst case communication required for this problem, where we seek to minimize the average number of bitsAlicemust transmit for the worst casex?X. We show that the communication required in this case is related to the capacityC(E) of the channelE, derived from(X,Y) , that mapsx?Xto the distribution ofY|X=x. We also show that the required communicationT(E) satisfiesC(E) ?T(E) ?C(E) + 2 log2(C(E)+1) +O(1). Using the first result, we derive a direct-sum theorem in communication complexity that substantially improves the previous such result shown by Jain, Radhakrishnan, and Sen [In Proc. 30th International Colloquium of Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP), ser. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2719. 2003, pp. 300-315]. These results are obtained by employing a rejection sampling procedure that relates the relative entropy between two distributions to the communication complexity of generating one distribution from the other.

Consider a two-party quantum communication protocol for computing some function f : {0, 1}/sup n/ /spl times/ {0, 1}/sup n/ /spl rarr/ Z. We show that the first message of P can be compressed to 0(k) classical bits using prior entanglement if it carries at most k bits of information about the sender's input. This implies a general direct sum result for one-round and simultaneous quantum protocols. It also implies a new round elimination lemma in quantum communication, which allows us to extend recent classical lower bounds on the cell probe complexity of some data structure problems, e.g. approximate nearest neighbor searching on the Hamming cube {0, 1}/sup n/, to the quantum setting. We then show an optimal tradeoff between the privacy losses of Alice and Bob in computing f in terms of the one-round quantum communication complexity of f with prior entanglement. This tradeoff is independent of the number of rounds of communication. The above message compression and privacy tradeoff results use a lot of qubits of prior entanglement, leading one to wonder how much prior entanglement is really required by a quantum protocol. We show that Newman's [1991] technique of reducing the number of public coins in a classical protocol cannot be lifted to the quantum setting. We do this by defining a general notion of black-box reduction of prior entanglement that subsumes Newman's technique. Intuitively, a black-box reduction does not change the unitary transforms of Alice and Bob; it only decreases the amount of entanglement of the prior entangled state. We prove that such a black-box reduction is impossible for quantum protocols by exhibiting a particular one-round quantum protocol for the equality function where the black-box technique fails to reduce the amount of prior entanglement by more than a constant factor.

We show lower bounds in the multi-party quantum communication complexity model. In this model, there are t parties where the ith party has input X/sub i/ /spl sube/ [n]. These parties communicate with each other by transmitting qubits to determine with high probability the value of some function F of their combined input (X/sub 1/,...,X/sub t/). We consider the class of Boolean valued functions whose value depends only on X/sub 1/ /spl cap/.../spl cap/ X/sub t/; that is, for each F in this class there is an f/sub F/ : 2/sup [n]/ /spl rarr/ {0,1}, such that F(X/sub 1/,...,X/sub t/) = f/sub F/(X/sub 1/ /spl cap/.../spl cap/ X/sub t/). We show that the t-party k-round communication complexity of F is /spl Omega/(s/sub m/(f/sub F/)/(k/sup 2/)), where s/sub m/(f/sub F/) stands for the monotone sensitivity of f/sub F/' and is defined by s/sub m/(f/sub F/) = /sup /spl utri// max/sub S/spl sube//[n] |{i : f/sub F/(S /spl cup/ {i}) /spl ne/ f/sub F/(S)}|. For two-party quantum communication protocols for the set disjointness problem, this implies that the two parties must exchange /spl Omega/(n/k/sup 2/) qubits. An upper bound of O(n/k) can be derived from the O(/spl radic/n) upper bound due to S. Aaronson and A. Ambainis (2003). For k = 1, our lower bound matches the /spl Omega/(n) lower bound observed by H. Buhrman and R. de Wolf (2001) (based on a result of A. Nayak (1999)), and for 2 /spl les/ k /spl Lt/ n/sup 1/4 /, improves the lower bound of /spl Omega/(/spl radic/n) shown by A. Razborov (2002). For protocols with no restrictions on the number of rounds, we can conclude that the two parties must exchange /spl Omega/(n/sup 1/3/) qubits. This, however, falls short of the optimal /spl Omega/ (/spl radic/n) lower bound shown by A. Razborov (2002). Our result is obtained by adapting to the quantum setting the elegant information-theoretic arguments of Z. Bar-Yossef et al. (2002). Using this method we can show similar lower bounds for the L/sub /spl infin// function considered in Z. Bar-Yossef et al. (2002).

An error-correcting code is said to be locally decodable if a randomized algorithm can recover any single bit of a message by reading only a small number of symbols of a possibly corrupted encoding of the message. Katz and Trevisan (2000) showed that any such code C: {0, 1} /spl rarr/ /spl Sigma//sup m/ with a decoding algorithm that makes at most q probes must satisfy m = /spl Omega/((n/log |/spl Sigma/|)/sup q/(q-1)/). They assumed that the decoding algorithm is non-adaptive, and left open the question of proving similar bounds for adaptive decoders. We improve the results of Katz and Trevisan (2000) in two ways. First, we give a more direct proof of their result. Second, and this is our main result, we prove that m = /spl Omega/((n/log|/spl Sigma/|)/sup q/(q-1)/) even if the decoding algorithm is adaptive. An important ingredient of our proof is a randomized method for smoothing an adaptive decoding algorithm. The main technical tool we employ is the Second Moment Method.

We prove a fundamental theorem about the relative entropy of quantum states, which roughly states that if the relative entropy, S(/spl rho//spl par//spl sigma/)/spl Delta/=Tr /spl rho/(log /spl rho/-log /spl sigma/), of two quantum states /spl rho/ and /spl sigma/ is at most c, then /spl rho//2/sup O(c)/ 'sits inside' /spl sigma/. Using this 'substate' theorem, we give tight lower bounds for the privacy loss of bounded error quantum communication protocols for the index function problem. We also use the 'substate' theorem to give tight lower bounds for the k-round bounded error quantum communication complexity of the pointer chasing problem, when the wrong player starts, and all the log n bits of the kth pointer are desired.