arXiv subjects

Laura Mančinska

Publications and source records attributed to Laura Mančinska.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Quantum interaction can superactivate cheating under parallel repetition

We study interactive multiprover games and many-round protocols in which the communication between the verifier and the provers is quantum. Parallel repetition is known to suppress soundness error of classical two-prover games arbitrarily close to zero, as shown by Raz (STOC '95), even with quantum strategies as shown by Yuen (ICALP '16), and Bavarian, Vidick and Yuen (STOC '17). Yet, we show that quantum communication can have the opposite, unexpected effect. Specifically, we exhibit a one-round quantum game and two-round $\mathsf{QMIP}$ protocols whose local (unentangled) value is strictly less than one for a single instance, yet equals one under $n$-fold parallel repetition for every $n \geq 2$. The key is that parallel repetition not only imposes additional winning conditions but also supplies additional quantum resources as entanglement in the exchanged states can be exploited jointly across copies. Our multiround examples build on superactivation of zero-error capacities of quantum channels. To establish this connection, we introduce quantum games and interactive protocols which capture the one-shot zero-error classical and quantum capacities, both with and without entanglement assistance. Our constructions use quantum-state verification and a teleportation-based reduction from two rounds to one. In contrast, when shared entanglement is allowed, we show that parallel repetition cannot increase the entangled value when at most $3$ messages are exchanged, consistent with classical results of Bellare, Impagliazzo and Naor (FOCS '97), and that of single-prover systems by Kitaev and Watrous (STOC '00). Combining this monotonicity with our quantum game-channel correspondence, we show that entanglement-assisted zero-error classical and quantum capacities cannot be superactivated.

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arXiv2026

Sample Optimal and Memory Efficient Quantum State Tomography

Quantum state tomography is the fundamental physical task of learning a complete classical description of an unknown state of a quantum system given coherent access to many identical samples of it. The complexity of this task is commonly characterised by its sample-complexity: the minimal number of samples needed to reach a certain target precision of the description. While the sample complexity of quantum state tomography has been well studied, the memory complexity has not been investigated in depth. Indeed, the bottleneck in the implementation of naïve sample-optimal quantum state tomography is its massive quantum memory requirements. In this work, we propose and analyse a quantum state tomography algorithm which retains sample-optimality but is also memory-efficient. Our work is built on a form of unitary Schur sampling and only requires streaming access to the samples.

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arXiv2026

Beyond real: Investigating the role of complex numbers in self-testing

We investigate complex self-testing, a generalization of standard self-testing that accounts for quantum strategies whose statistics is indistinguishable from their complex conjugate's. We show that many structural results from standard self-testing extend to the complex setting, including lifting of common assumptions. Our main result is an operator-algebraic characterization: complex self-testing is equivalent to uniqueness of the real parts of higher moments, leading to a basis-independent formulation in terms of real C* algebras. This leads to a classification of non-local strategies, and a tight boundary where standard self-testing does not apply and complex self-testing is necessary. We further construct a strategy involving quaternions, establishing the first standard self-test for genuinely complex strategy. Our work clarifies the structure of complex self-testing and highlights the subtle role of complex numbers in bipartite Bell non-locality.

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arXiv2025

Classification and implementation of unitary-equivariant and permutation-invariant quantum channels

Many quantum information tasks use inputs of the form $ρ^{\otimes m}$, which naturally induce permutation and unitary symmetries. We classify all quantum channels that respect both symmetries - i.e. unitary-equivariant and permutation-invariant quantum channels from $(\mathbb{C}^{d})^{\otimes m}$ to $(\mathbb{C}^{d})^{\otimes n}$ - via their extremal points. Operationally, each extremal quantum channel factors as unitary Schur sampling $\rightarrow$ an irrep-level unitary-equivariant quantum channel $\rightarrow$ the adjoint unitary Schur sampling. We give a streaming implementation ansatz that uses an efficient streaming implementation of unitary Schur sampling together with a resource-state primitive, and we apply it to state symmetrization, symmetric cloning, and purity amplification. In these applications we obtain polynomial-time algorithms with exponential memory improvements in $m,n$. Further, for symmetric cloning we present, to our knowledge, the first efficient (polynomial-time) algorithm with explicit memory and gate bounds.

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arXiv2025

Gap-preserving reductions and RE-completeness of independent set games

In complexity theory, gap-preserving reductions play a crucial role in studying hardness of approximation and in analyzing the relative complexity of multiprover interactive proof systems. In the quantum setting, multiprover interactive proof systems with entangled provers correspond to gapped promise problems for nonlocal games, and the recent result MIP$^*$=RE \cite{ji2020mipre} shows that these are in general undecidable. However, the relative complexity of problems within MIP$^*$ is still not well-understood, as establishing gap-preserving reductions in the quantum setting presents new challenges. In this paper, we introduce a framework to study such reductions and use it to establish MIP$^*$-completeness of the gapped promise problem for the natural class of independent set games. In such a game, the goal is to determine whether a given graph contains an independent set of a specified size. We construct families of independent set games with constant question size for which the gapped promise problem is undecidable. In contrast, the same problem is decidable in polynomial time in the classical setting. To carry out our reduction, we establish a new stability theorem, which could be of independent interest, allowing us to perturb families of almost PVMs to genuine PVMs.

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arXiv2025

Quantum Perfect Matchings

We investigate quantum and nonsignaling generalizations of perfect matchings in graphs using nonlocal games. Specifically, we introduce nonlocal games that test for $L$-perfect matchings in bipartite graphs, perfect matchings in general graphs and hypergraphs, and fractional perfect matchings. Our definitions come from the fact that these games are classical property tests for the corresponding matching conditions. We use the existence of perfect quantum and nonsignaling strategies for these games to define quantum and nonsignaling versions of perfect matchings. Finally, we provide characterizations of when graphs exhibit these extended properties: - For nonsignaling matchings, we give a complete combinatorial characterizations. In particular, a graph has a nonsignaling perfect matching if and only if it admits a fractional perfect matching that has bounded value on triangles. \item In bipartite graphs, the nonsignaling $L$-perfect matching property is achieved exactly when the left component of the graph can be split into two disjoint subgraphs: one with a classical $L$-perfect matching and another with left-degree 2. - In the quantum setting, we show that complete graphs $K_n$ with odd $n \geq 7$ have quantum perfect matchings. We prove that a graph has a quantum perfect matching if and only if the quantum independence number of its line graph is maximal, extending a classical relationship between perfect matchings and line graph independence numbers. - For bipartite graphs, we establish that the $L$-perfect matching game does not exhibit quantum pseudotelepathy, but we characterize the quantum advantage for complete bipartite graphs $K_{n,2}$. - Additionally, we prove that deciding quantum perfect matchings in hypergraphs is undecidable and leave open the question of its complexity in graphs.

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arXiv2024

A memory and gate efficient algorithm for unitary mixed Schur sampling

We formalize the task of unitary Schur sampling -- an extension of weak Schur sampling -- which is the process of measuring the Young label and the unitary group register of an input $m$ qudit state. Intuitively, this task is equivalent to applying the Schur transform, projecting onto the isotypic subspaces of the unitary and symmetric groups indexed by the Young labels, and discarding of the permutation register. As such unitary Schur sampling is the natural task in processes such as quantum state tomography or spectrum estimation. We generalize this task to unitary mixed Schur sampling to account for the recently introduced mixed Schur-Weyl transform. We provide a streaming algorithm which achieves an exponential reduction in the memory complexity and a polynomial reduction in the gate complexity over naïve algorithms for the task of unitary (mixed) Schur sampling. Further, we show that if the input state has limited rank, the gate and memory complexities of our streaming algorithm as well as the algorithms for the full Schur and mixed Schur transforms are further reduced. Our work generalizes and improves on the results in arXiv2309.11947.

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arXiv2024

Quantum Advantage with Faulty Oracle

This paper investigates the impact of noise in the quantum query model, a fundamental framework for quantum algorithms. We focus on the scenario where the oracle is subject to non-unitary (or irreversible) noise, specifically under the \textit{faulty oracle} model, where the oracle fails with a constant probability and acts as identity. Regev and Schiff (ICALP'08) showed that quantum advantage is lost for the search problem under this noise model. Our main result shows that every quantum query algorithm can be made robust in this noise model with a roughly quadratic blow-up in query complexity, thereby preserving quantum speedup for all problems where the quantum advantage is super-cubic. This is the first non-trivial robustification of quantum query algorithms against an oracle that is noisy.

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arXiv2024

Maximal device-independent randomness in every dimension

Random numbers are used in a wide range of sciences. In many applications, generating unpredictable private random numbers is indispensable. Device-independent quantum random number generation is a framework that makes use of the intrinsic randomness of quantum processes to generate numbers that are fundamentally unpredictable according to our current understanding of physics. While device-independent quantum random number generation is an exceptional theoretical feat, the difficulty of controlling quantum systems makes it challenging to carry out in practice. It is therefore desirable to harness the full power of the quantum degrees of freedom (the dimension) that one can control. It is known that no more than $2 \log(d)$ bits of private device-independent randomness can be extracted from a quantum system of local dimension $d$. In this paper we demonstrate that this bound can be achieved for all dimensions $d$ by providing a family of explicit protocols. In order to obtain our result, we develop new certification techniques that can be of wider interest in device-independent applications for scenarios in which complete certification ('self-testing') is impossible or impractical.

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arXiv2023

A mathematical foundation for self-testing: Lifting common assumptions

In this work we study the phenomenon of self-testing from the first principles, aiming to place this versatile concept on a rigorous mathematical footing. Self-testing allows a classical verifier to infer a quantum mechanical description of untrusted quantum devices that she interacts with in a black-box manner. Somewhat contrary to the black-box paradigm, existing self-testing results tend to presuppose conditions that constrain the operation of the untrusted devices. A common assumption is that these devices perform a projective measurement of a pure quantum state. Naturally, in the absence of any prior knowledge it would be appropriate to model these devices as measuring a mixed state using POVM measurements, since the purifying/dilating spaces could be held by the environment or an adversary. We prove a general theorem allowing to remove these assumptions, thereby promoting most existing self-testing results to their assumption-free variants. On the other hand, we pin-point situations where assumptions cannot be lifted without loss of generality. As a key (counter)example we identify a quantum correlation which is a self-test only if certain assumptions are made. Remarkably, this is also the first example of a correlation that cannot be implemented using projective measurements on a bipartite state of full Schmidt rank. Finally, we compare existing self-testing definitions, establishing many equivalences as well as identifying subtle differences.

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arXiv2023

Weak Schur sampling with logarithmic quantum memory

The quantum Schur transform maps the computational basis of a system of $n$ qudits onto a \textit{Schur basis}, which spans the minimal invariant subspaces of the representations of the unitary and the symmetric groups acting on the state space of $n$ $d$-level systems. We introduce a new algorithm for the task of weak Schur sampling. Our algorithm efficiently determines both the Young label which indexes the irreducible representations and the multiplicity label of the symmetric group. There are two major advantages of our algorithm for weak Schur sampling when compared to existing approaches which proceed via quantum Schur transform algorithm or Generalized Phase Estimation algorithm. First, our algorihtm is suitable for streaming applications and second it is exponentially more efficient in its memory usage. We show that an instance of our weak Schur sampling algorithm on $n$ qubits to accuracy $ε$ requires only $O(\log_2n)$ qubits of memory and $O(n^3\log_2(\frac{n}ε))$ gates from the Clifford+T set. Further, we show that our weak Schur sampling algorithm on $n$ qudits decomposes into $O\big(dn^{2d}\log_2^p\big(\frac{n^{2d}}ε\big)\big)$ gates from an arbitrary fault-tolerant qudit universal set, for $p\approx 4$, and requires a memory of $O(\log_dn)$ qudits to implement.

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arXiv2023

All Real Projective Measurements Can be Self-tested

Self-testing is the strongest form of quantum functionality verification which allows a classical user to deduce the quantum state and measurements used to produce measurement statistics. While self-testing of quantum states is well-understood, self-testing of measurements, especially in high dimensions, has remained more elusive. We demonstrate the first general result in this direction by showing that every real projective measurement can be self-tested. The standard definition of self-testing only allows for the certification of real measurements. Therefore, our work effectively broadens the scope of self-testable projective measurements to their full potential. To reach this result, we employ the idea that existing self-tests can be extended to verify additional untrusted measurements. This is known as `post-hoc self-testing'. We formalize the method of post-hoc self-testing and establish a sufficient condition for its application. Using this condition we construct self-tests for all real projective measurements. Inspired by our construction, we develop a new technique of iterative self-testing, which involves using post-hoc self-testing in a sequential manner. Starting from any established self-test, we fully characterize the set of measurements that can be verified via iterative self-testing. This provides a clear methodology for constructing new self-tests from pre-existing ones.

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arXiv2023

Counterexamples in self-testing

In the recent years self-testing has grown into a rich and active area of study with applications ranging from practical verification of quantum devices to deep complexity theoretic results. Self-testing allows a classical verifier to deduce which quantum measurements and on what state are used, for example, by provers Alice and Bob in a nonlocal game. Hence, self-testing as well as its noise-tolerant cousin -- robust self-testing -- are desirable features for a nonlocal game to have. Contrary to what one might expect, we have a rather incomplete understanding of if and how self-testing could fail to hold. In particular, could it be that every 2-party nonlocal game or Bell inequality with a quantum advantage certifies the presence of a specific quantum state? Also, is it the case that every self-testing result can be turned robust with enough ingeniuty and effort? We answer these questions in the negative by providing simple and fully explicit counterexamples. To this end, given two nonlocal games $\mathcal{G}_1$ and $\mathcal{G}_2$, we introduce the $(\mathcal{G}_1 \lor \mathcal{G}_2)$-game, in which the players get pairs of questions and choose which game they want to play. The players win if they choose the same game and win it with the answers they have given. Our counterexamples are based on this game and we believe this class of games to be of independent interest.

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arXiv2022

Quantum majority vote

Majority vote is a basic method for amplifying correct outcomes that is widely used in computer science and beyond. While it can amplify the correctness of a quantum device with classical output, the analogous procedure for quantum output is not known. We introduce quantum majority vote as the following task: given a product state $|ψ_1\rangle \otimes \dots \otimes |ψ_n\rangle$ where each qubit is in one of two orthogonal states $|ψ\rangle$ or $|ψ^\perp\rangle$, output the majority state. We show that an optimal algorithm for this problem achieves worst-case fidelity of $1/2 + Θ(1/\sqrt{n})$. Under the promise that at least $2/3$ of the input qubits are in the majority state, the fidelity increases to $1 - Θ(1/n)$ and approaches $1$ as $n$ increases. We also consider the more general problem of computing any symmetric and equivariant Boolean function $f: \{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ in an unknown quantum basis, and show that a generalization of our quantum majority vote algorithm is optimal for this task. The optimal parameters for the generalized algorithm and its worst-case fidelity can be determined by a simple linear program of size $O(n)$. The time complexity of the algorithm is $O(n^4 \log n)$ where $n$ is the number of input qubits.

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arXiv2022

The geometry of Bloch space in the context of quantum random access codes

We study the communication protocol known as a Quantum Random Access Code (QRAC) which encodes $n$ classical bits into $m$ qubits ($m \tfrac{1}{2}$. Such a code is denoted by $(n,m,p)$-QRAC. If cooperation is allowed through a shared random string we call it a QRAC with shared randomness. We prove that for any $(n,m,p)$-QRAC with shared randomness the parameter $p$ is upper bounded by $ \tfrac{1}{2}+\tfrac{1}{2}\sqrt{\tfrac{2^{m-1}}{n}}$. For $m=2$ this gives a new bound of $p\le \tfrac{1}{2}+\tfrac{1}{\sqrt{2n}}$ confirming a conjecture by Imamichi and Raymond (AQIS'18). Our bound implies that the previously known analytical constructions of $(3,2,\tfrac{1}{2}+\tfrac{1}{\sqrt{6}})$- , $(4,2,\tfrac{1}{2}+\tfrac{1}{2\sqrt{2}})$- and $(6,2,\tfrac{1}{2}+\tfrac{1}{2\sqrt{3}})$-QRACs are optimal. To obtain our bound we investigate the geometry of quantum states in the Bloch vector representation and make use of a geometric interpretation of the fact that any two quantum states have a non-negative overlap.

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arXiv2021

Products of synchronous games

We show that the *-algebra of the product of two synchronous games is the tensor product of the corresponding *-algebras. We prove that the product game has a perfect C*-strategy if and only if each of the individual games does, and that in this case the C*-algebra of the product game is *-isomorphic to the maximal C*-tensor product of the individual C*-algebras. We provide examples of synchronous games whose synchronous values are strictly supermultiplicative.

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arXiv2021

Glued magic games self-test maximally entangled states

Self-testing results allow us to infer the underlying quantum mechanical description of states and measurements from classical outputs produced by non-communicating parties. The standard definition of self-testing does not apply in situations when there are two or more inequivalent optimal strategies. To address this, we introduce the notion of self-testing convex combinations of reference strategies, which is a generalisation of self-testing to multiple strategies. We show that the Glued Magic Square game [Quantum 4 (2020), p. 346] self-tests a convex combination of two inequivalent strategies. As a corollary, we obtain that the Glued Magic square game self-tests two EPR pairs thus answering an open question from [Quantum 4 (2020), p. 346]. Our self-test is robust and extends to natural generalisations of the Glued Magic Square game.

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arXiv2021

Constant-sized robust self-tests for states and measurements of unbounded dimension

We consider correlations, $p_{n,x}$, arising from measuring a maximally entangled state using $n$ measurements with two outcomes each, constructed from $n$ projections that add up to $xI$. We show that the correlations $p_{n,x}$ robustly self-test the underlying states and measurements. To achieve this, we lift the group-theoretic Gowers-Hatami based approach for proving robust self-tests to a more natural algebraic framework. A key step is to obtain an analogue of the Gowers-Hatami theorem allowing to perturb an "approximate" representation of the relevant algebra to an exact one. For $n=4$, the correlations $p_{n,x}$ self-test the maximally entangled state of every odd dimension as well as 2-outcome projective measurements of arbitrarily high rank. The only other family of constant-sized self-tests for strategies of unbounded dimension is due to Fu (QIP 2020) who presents such self-tests for an infinite family of maximally entangled states with even local dimension. Therefore, we are the first to exhibit a constant-sized self-test for measurements of unbounded dimension as well as all maximally entangled states with odd local dimension.

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