Self similar sets, entropy and additive combinatorics

This article is an exposition of recent results on self-similar sets, asserting that if the dimension is smaller than the trivial upper bound then there are almost overlaps between cylinders. We give a heuristic derivation of the theorem using elementary arguments about covering numbers. We also give a short introduction to additive combinatorics, focusing on inverse theorems, which play a pivotal role in the proof. Our elementary approach avoids many of the technicalities in the original proof but also falls short of a complete proof. In the last section we discuss how the heuristic argument is turned into a rigorous one.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures; submitted to Proceedings of AFRT 2012. v5: more typos correcte

Polarization of the Renyi Information Dimension with Applications to Compressed Sensing

In this paper, we show that the Hadamard matrix acts as an extractor over the reals of the Renyi information dimension (RID), in an analogous way to how it acts as an extractor of the discrete entropy over finite fields. More precisely, we prove that the RID of an i.i.d. sequence of mixture random variables polarizes to the extremal values of 0 and 1 (corresponding to discrete and continuous distributions) when transformed by a Hadamard matrix. Further, we prove that the polarization pattern of the RID admits a closed form expression and follows exactly the Binary Erasure Channel (BEC) polarization pattern in the discrete setting. We also extend the results from the single- to the multi-terminal setting, obtaining a Slepian-Wolf counterpart of the RID polarization. We discuss applications of the RID polarization to Compressed Sensing of i.i.d. sources. In particular, we use the RID polarization to construct a family of deterministic $\pm 1$-valued sensing matrices for Compressed Sensing. We run numerical simulations to compare the performance of the resulting matrices with that of random Gaussian and random Hadamard matrices. The results indicate that the proposed matrices afford competitive performances while being explicitly constructed.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

Coding Theorems for Quantum Channels

The more than thirty years old issue of the (classical) information capacity of quantum communication channels was dramatically clarified during the last years, when a number of direct quantum coding theorems was discovered. The present paper gives a self contained treatment of the subject, following as much in parallel as possible with classical information theory and, on the other side, stressing profound differences of the quantum case. An emphasis is made on recent results, such as general quantum coding theorems including cases of infinite (possibly continuous) alphabets and constrained inputs, reliability function for pure state channels and quantum Gaussian channel. Several still unsolved problems are briefly outlined.Comment: 41 pages, Latex, eps figure. Extended version of report appeared in "Tamagawa University Research Review", no. 4, 199

Bounds on Information Combining With Quantum Side Information

"Bounds on information combining" are entropic inequalities that determine how the information (entropy) of a set of random variables can change when these are combined in certain prescribed ways. Such bounds play an important role in classical information theory, particularly in coding and Shannon theory; entropy power inequalities are special instances of them. The arguably most elementary kind of information combining is the addition of two binary random variables (a CNOT gate), and the resulting quantities play an important role in Belief propagation and Polar coding. We investigate this problem in the setting where quantum side information is available, which has been recognized as a hard setting for entropy power inequalities. Our main technical result is a non-trivial, and close to optimal, lower bound on the combined entropy, which can be seen as an almost optimal "quantum Mrs. Gerber's Lemma". Our proof uses three main ingredients: (1) a new bound on the concavity of von Neumann entropy, which is tight in the regime of low pairwise state fidelities; (2) the quantitative improvement of strong subadditivity due to Fawzi-Renner, in which we manage to handle the minimization over recovery maps; (3) recent duality results on classical-quantum-channels due to Renes et al. We furthermore present conjectures on the optimal lower and upper bounds under quantum side information, supported by interesting analytical observations and strong numerical evidence. We finally apply our bounds to Polar coding for binary-input classical-quantum channels, and show the following three results: (A) Even non-stationary channels polarize under the polar transform. (B) The blocklength required to approach the symmetric capacity scales at most sub-exponentially in the gap to capacity. (C) Under the aforementioned lower bound conjecture, a blocklength polynomial in the gap suffices.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures; v2: small correction

Spin glass reflection of the decoding transition for quantum error correcting codes

We study the decoding transition for quantum error correcting codes with the help of a mapping to random-bond Wegner spin models. Families of quantum low density parity-check (LDPC) codes with a finite decoding threshold lead to both known models (e.g., random bond Ising and random plaquette $\Z2$ gauge models) as well as unexplored earlier generally non-local disordered spin models with non-trivial phase diagrams. The decoding transition corresponds to a transition from the ordered phase by proliferation of extended defects which generalize the notion of domain walls to non-local spin models. In recently discovered quantum LDPC code families with finite rates the number of distinct classes of such extended defects is exponentially large, corresponding to extensive ground state entropy of these codes. Here, the transition can be driven by the entropy of the extended defects, a mechanism distinct from that in the local spin models where the number of defect types (domain walls) is always finite.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure