The concepts of quantum correlation complexity and quantum communication
complexity were recently proposed to quantify the minimum amount of resources
needed in generating bipartite classical or quantum states in the single-shot
setting. The former is the minimum size of the initially shared state Ο
on which local operations by the two parties (without communication) can
generate the target state Ο, and the latter is the minimum amount of
communication needed when initially sharing nothing. In this paper, we
generalize these two concepts to multipartite cases, for both exact and
approximate state generation. Our results are summarized as follows. (1) For
multipartite pure states, the correlation complexity can be completely
characterized by local ranks of sybsystems. (2) We extend the notion of
PSD-rank of matrices to that of tensors, and use it to bound the quantum
correlation complexity for generating multipartite classical distributions. (3)
For generating multipartite mixed quantum states, communication complexity is
not always equal to correlation complexity (as opposed to bipartite case). But
they differ by at most a factor of 2. Generating a multipartite mixed quantum
state has the same communication complexity as generating its optimal
purification. But for correlation complexity of these two tasks can be
different (though still related by less than a factor of 2). (4) To generate a
bipartite classical distribution P(x,y) approximately, the quantum
communication complexity is completely characterized by the approximate
PSD-rank of P. The quantum correlation complexity of approximately generating
multipartite pure states is bounded by approximate local ranks.Comment: 19 pages; some typos are correcte