Distributed Channel Synthesis

Two familiar notions of correlation are rediscovered as the extreme operating points for distributed synthesis of a discrete memoryless channel, in which a stochastic channel output is generated based on a compressed description of the channel input. Wyner's common information is the minimum description rate needed. However, when common randomness independent of the input is available, the necessary description rate reduces to Shannon's mutual information. This work characterizes the optimal trade-off between the amount of common randomness used and the required rate of description. We also include a number of related derivations, including the effect of limited local randomness, rate requirements for secrecy, applications to game theory, and new insights into common information duality. Our proof makes use of a soft covering lemma, known in the literature for its role in quantifying the resolvability of a channel. The direct proof (achievability) constructs a feasible joint distribution over all parts of the system using a soft covering, from which the behavior of the encoder and decoder is inferred, with no explicit reference to joint typicality or binning. Of auxiliary interest, this work also generalizes and strengthens this soft covering tool.Comment: To appear in IEEE Trans. on Information Theory (submitted Aug., 2012, accepted July, 2013), 26 pages, using IEEEtran.cl

Quantum soft-covering lemma with applications to rate-distortion coding, resolvability and identification via quantum channels

We propose a quantum soft-covering problem for a given general quantum channel and one of its output states, which consists in finding the minimum rank of an input state needed to approximate the given channel output. We then prove a one-shot quantum covering lemma in terms of smooth min-entropies by leveraging decoupling techniques from quantum Shannon theory. This covering result is shown to be equivalent to a coding theorem for rate distortion under a posterior (reverse) channel distortion criterion [Atif, Sohail, Pradhan, arXiv:2302.00625]. Both one-shot results directly yield corollaries about the i.i.d. asymptotics, in terms of the coherent information of the channel. The power of our quantum covering lemma is demonstrated by two additional applications: first, we formulate a quantum channel resolvability problem, and provide one-shot as well as asymptotic upper and lower bounds. Secondly, we provide new upper bounds on the unrestricted and simultaneous identification capacities of quantum channels, in particular separating for the first time the simultaneous identification capacity from the unrestricted one, proving a long-standing conjecture of the last author.Comment: 29 pages, 3 figures; v2 fixes an error in Definition 6.1 and various typos and minor issues throughou