Universal Bounds for Out-of-Distribution Unitary Learning

Abstract

How much can the action of an unknown unitary dynamics on one family of states reveal about its action elsewhere? We develop a general framework for out-of-distribution quantum dynamics learning based on the first and second moments of the input distribution. These define a notion of the bias and expressivity of an ensemble, which together control generalization between arbitrary pure-state training and testing distributions. Our framework shows that only studying the action of a unitary on random real states can learn its action on random complex states, that tensor products of unbiased pure-state ensembles preserve expressivity, and that single-qubit risks are independent of bias. It also recovers earlier locally scrambling results as loose special cases and yields tight product-to-Haar bounds. We conclude with a series of no-go results and limited generalization bounds for learning certain channels, which further serve to underscore the distinctive role of unitarity in enabling out-of-distribution generalization.