Empirical processes, typical sequences and coordinated actions in standard Borel spaces

This paper proposes a new notion of typical sequences on a wide class of abstract alphabets (so-called standard Borel spaces), which is based on approximations of memoryless sources by empirical distributions uniformly over a class of measurable "test functions." In the finite-alphabet case, we can take all uniformly bounded functions and recover the usual notion of strong typicality (or typicality under the total variation distance). For a general alphabet, however, this function class turns out to be too large, and must be restricted. With this in mind, we define typicality with respect to any Glivenko-Cantelli function class (i.e., a function class that admits a Uniform Law of Large Numbers) and demonstrate its power by giving simple derivations of the fundamental limits on the achievable rates in several source coding scenarios, in which the relevant operational criteria pertain to reproducing empirical averages of a general-alphabet stationary memoryless source with respect to a suitable function class.Comment: 14 pages, 3 pdf figures; accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Secret Key Agreement: General Capacity and Second-Order Asymptotics

We revisit the problem of secret key agreement using interactive public communication for two parties and propose a new secret key agreement protocol. The protocol attains the secret key capacity for general observations and attains the second-order asymptotic term in the maximum length of a secret key for independent and identically distributed observations. In contrast to the previously suggested secret key agreement protocols, the proposed protocol uses interactive communication. In fact, the standard one-way communication protocol used prior to this work fails to attain the asymptotic results above. Our converse proofs rely on a recently established upper bound for secret key lengths. Both our lower and upper bounds are derived in a single-shot setup and the asymptotic results are obtained as corollaries