Biased Random Access Codes

Abstract

A random access code (RAC) is a communication task in which the sender encodes a random message into a shorter one to be decoded by the receiver so that a randomly chosen character of the original message is recovered with some probability. Both the message and the character to be recovered are assumed to be uniformly distributed. In this paper, we extend this protocol by allowing more general distributions of these inputs, which alters the encoding and decoding strategies optimizing the protocol performance, with either classical or quantum resources. We approach the problem of optimizing the performance of these biased RACs with both numerical and analytical tools. On the numerical front, we present algorithms that allow a numerical evaluation of the optimal performance over both classical and quantum strategies and provide a Python package designed to implement them, called RAC-tools. We then use this numerical tool to investigate single-parameter families of biased RACs in the $n^2 \mapsto 1$ and $2^d \mapsto 1$ scenarios. For RACs in the $n^2 \mapsto 1$ scenario, we derive a general upper bound for the cases in which the inputs are not correlated, which coincides with the quantum value for $n=2$ and, in some cases for $n=3$. Moreover, it is shown that attaining this upper bound self-tests pairs or triples of rank-1 projective measurements, respectively. An analogous upper bound is derived for the value of RACs in the $2^d \mapsto 1$ scenario, which is shown to be always attainable using mutually unbiased measurements if the distribution of input strings is unbiased.