arXiv subjects

Milán Mosonyi

Publications and source records attributed to Milán Mosonyi.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Error bounds for composite quantum hypothesis testing and a new characterization of the weighted Kubo-Ando geometric means

The optimal error exponents of binary composite i.i.d.~state discrimination are trivially bounded by the worst-case pairwise exponents of discriminating individual elements of the sets representing the two hypotheses, and in the finite-dimensional classical case, these bounds in fact give exact single-copy expressions for the error exponents. In contrast, in the non-commutative case, the optimal exponents are only known to be expressible in terms of regularized divergences, resulting in formulas that, while conceptually relevant, are practically not very useful. In this paper, we develop further an approach initiated in [Mosonyi, Szilágyi, Weiner, IEEE Trans.~Inf.~Th.~68(2):1032--1067, 2022] to give improved single-copy bounds on the error exponents by comparing not only individual states from the two hypotheses, but also various unnormalized positive semi-definite operators associated to them. Here, we show a number of equivalent characterizations of such operators giving valid bounds, and show that in the commutative case, considering weighted geometric means of the states, and in the case of two states per hypothesis, considering weighted Kubo-Ando geometric means, are optimal for this approach. As a result, we give a new characterization of the weighted Kubo-Ando geometric means as the only $2$-variable operator geometric means that are block additive, tensor multiplicative, continuous on monotone decreasing sequences, and satisfy the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality. We also extend our results to composite quantum channel discrimination, and show an analogous optimality property of the weighted Kubo-Ando geometric means of two quantum channels, a notion that seems to be new. We extend this concept to defining the notion of superoperator perspective function and establish some of its basic properties, which may be of independent interest.

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arXiv2026

Regularized barycentric Rényi divergences

Barycentric Rényi divergences were introduced in [Mosonyi, Bunth, Vrana, Linear Algebra and its Applications, 2024] as an alternative to standard Kubo-Ando constructions to define multivariate quantum Rényi divergences. They are defined via a variational expression and depend on a finite collection of quantum relative entropies $D^{q_x}$. When all the relative entropies are monotone under CPTP maps then so are the corresponding barycentric Rényi divergences, and when all the relative entropies are additive then the corresponding barycentric Rényi divergences are subadditive under tensor product. Additivity has only been established before for the case where all $D^{q_x}$ are chosen to be the Umegaki relative entropy, which is also the only case where the barycentric Rényi divergence (called the minimal one) was known to admit an explicit expression. Here we settle the problem of additivity by showing that for any choice of monotone quantum relative entropies, the regularized barycentric Rényi divergence coincides with the minimal barycentric Rényi divergence on invertible inputs. This in turn implies that if at least two of the $D^{q_x}$ are strictly larger than the Umegaki relative entropy (in a precise sense), then the resulting barycentric Rényi divergence is not even weakly additive.

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arXiv2026

Rényi divergences and binary state discrimination error exponents for fermionic quasi-free states

The trade-off relations between the two types of error probabilities in binary i.i.d. quantum state discrimination can be expressed by single-copy formulas in terms of the Petz-type and the sandwiched Rényi divergences of the two states representing the two hypotheses. In the non-i.i.d. setting, the error exponents can usually be expressed in terms of regularized Rényi divergences, which do not admit explicit formulas in general. Here, we consider a class of states, translation-invariant and gauge-invariant quasifree states on doubly infinite fermionic chains, and give explicit formulas for a wide range of regularized Rényi divergences between such states, including $(α,z)$, log-Euclidean, geometric, measured, and the recently introduced integral Rényi divergences. We show that the case where there is a single mode at each lattice site becomes asymptotically classical, with all the different types of regularized Rényi divergences being equal, while in the case of multiple modes per site, non-commutativity persists under regularization, and for any fixed $α$, the regularized Rényi $(α,z)$-divergences give different regularized values for different $z$ parameters in general. We also generalize a previous construction from [Bunth, Maróti, Mosonyi, Zimborás, Lett.~Math.~Phys.~113:(7), 2023] to the case of multiple modes per lattice site to obtain a large class of states exhibiting super-exponential decay of the discrimination error probabilities.

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arXiv2026

Hockey stick $f$-divergences

In this paper we give a systematic and unified treatment and extensions of various results on a new notion of quantum $f$-divergences defined from quantum hockey stick divergences, the theory of which has been developed recently in \cite{BHT_fdiv,HircheTomamichel_integral,LiuHircheCheng2025}. In particular, we consider non-normalized states and hockey stick $f$-divergences defined from more general notions of quantum hockey stick divergences, as well as a somewhat more general form of the integral representation defined in terms of an additional real parameter. We also consider the extension of the theory to general von Neumann algebras, and extend various results from \cite{HircheTomamichel_integral,LiuHircheCheng2025} to this setting. Our main results here are the representation of the hockey stick $f$-divergences in terms of Neyman-Pearson error probabilities, which was given in the finite-dimensional case in \cite{LiuHircheCheng2025}, an extension of Jen\v cová's result \cite{Jencova2023} on the detection of reversibility of a quantum channel on a pair of states in terms of the hockey stick divergences, and an extension of a result in \cite{HircheTomamichel_integral} showing that the regularized hockey stick Rényi $α$-divergences coincide with the Petz-type Rényi divergences for $α\in(0,1)$ and with the sandwiched Rényi divergences for $α>1$. Moreover, we give some partial results on the characterization of when different notions of quantum $f$-divergences give the same value on a pair of quantum states.

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arXiv2026

Barycentric bounds on the error exponents of quantum hypothesis exclusion

Quantum state exclusion is an operational task with application to ontological interpretations of quantum states. In such a task, one is given a system whose state is randomly selected from a finite set, and the goal is to identify a state from the set that is not the true state of the system. An error occurs if and only if the state identified is the true state. In this paper, we study the optimal error probability of quantum state exclusion and its error exponent from an information-theoretic perspective. Our main finding is a single-letter upper bound on the error exponent of state exclusion given by the multivariate log-Euclidean Chernoff divergence, and we prove that this improves upon the best previously known upper bound. We also extend our analysis to quantum channel exclusion, and we establish a single-letter and efficiently computable upper bound on its error exponent, admitting the use of adaptive strategies. We derive both upper bounds, for state and channel exclusion, based on one-shot analysis and formulate them as a type of multivariate divergence measure called a barycentric Chernoff divergence. Moreover, our result on channel exclusion has implications in two important special cases. First, when there are two hypotheses, our result provides the first known efficiently computable upper bound on the error exponent of symmetric binary channel discrimination. Second, when all channels are classical, we show that our upper bound is achievable by a parallel strategy, thus solving the exact error exponent of classical channel exclusion.

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arXiv2025

Converse bounds for quantum hypothesis exclusion: A divergence-radius approach

Hypothesis exclusion is an information-theoretic task in which an experimenter aims at ruling out a false hypothesis from a finite set of known candidates, and an error occurs if and only if the hypothesis being ruled out is the ground truth. For the tasks of quantum state exclusion and quantum channel exclusion -- where hypotheses are represented by quantum states and quantum channels, respectively -- efficiently computable upper bounds on the asymptotic error exponents were established in a recent work of the current authors [Ji et al., arXiv:2407.13728 (2024)], where the derivation was based on nonasymptotic analysis. In this companion paper of our previous work, we provide alternative proofs for the same upper bounds on the asymptotic error exponents of quantum state and channel exclusion, but using a conceptually different approach from the one adopted in the previous work. Specifically, we apply strong converse results for asymmetric binary hypothesis testing to distinguishing an arbitrary ``dummy'' hypothesis from each of the concerned candidates. This leads to the desired upper bounds in terms of divergence radii via a geometrically inspired argument.

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arXiv2024

Geometric relative entropies and barycentric Rényi divergences

We give systematic ways of defining monotone quantum relative entropies and (multi-variate) quantum Rényi divergences starting from a set of monotone quantum relative entropies. Despite its central importance in information theory, only two additive and monotone quantum extensions of the classical relative entropy have been known so far, the Umegaki and the Belavkin-Staszewski relative entropies. Here we give a general procedure to construct monotone and additive quantum relative entropies from a given one with the same properties; in particular, when starting from the Umegaki relative entropy, this gives a new one-parameter family of monotone and additive quantum relative entropies interpolating between the Umegaki and the Belavkin-Staszewski ones on full-rank states. In a different direction, we use a generalization of a classical variational formula to define multi-variate quantum Rényi quantities corresponding to any finite set of quantum relative entropies $(D^{q_x})_{x\in X}$ and signed probability measure $P$, as $$ Q_P^{\mathrm{b},\mathbf{q}}((ρ_x)_{x\in X}):=\sup_{τ\ge 0}\left\{\text{Tr}\,τ-\sum_xP(x)D^{q_x}(τ\|ρ_x)\right\}. $$ We show that monotone quantum relative entropies define monotone Rényi quantities whenever $P$ is a probability measure. With the proper normalization, the negative logarithm of the above quantity gives a quantum extension of the classical Rényi $α$-divergence in the 2-variable case ($X=\{0,1\}$, $P(0)=α$). We show that if both $D^{q_0}$ and $D^{q_1}$ are monotone and additive quantum relative entropies, and at least one of them is strictly larger than the Umegaki relative entropy then the resulting barycentric Rényi divergences are strictly between the log-Euclidean and the maximal Rényi divergences, and hence they are different from any previously studied quantum Rényi divergence.

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arXiv2023

Some continuity properties of quantum Rényi divergences

In the problem of binary quantum channel discrimination with product inputs, the supremum of all type II error exponents for which the optimal type I errors go to zero is equal to the Umegaki channel relative entropy, while the infimum of all type II error exponents for which the optimal type I errors go to one is equal to the infimum of the sandwiched channel Rényi $α$-divergences over all $α>1$. We prove the equality of these two threshold values (and therefore the strong converse property for this problem) using a minimax argument based on a newly established continuity property of the sandwiched Rényi divergences. Motivated by this, we give a detailed analysis of the continuity properties of various other quantum (channel) Rényi divergences, which may be of independent interest.

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arXiv2023

Quantum Rényi divergences and the strong converse exponent of state discrimination in operator algebras

The sandwiched Rényi $α$-divergences of two finite-dimensional quantum states play a distinguished role among the many quantum versions of Rényi divergences as the tight quantifiers of the trade-off between the two error probabilities in the strong converse domain of state discrimination. In this paper we show the same for the sandwiched Rényi divergences of two normal states on an injective von Neumann algebra, thereby establishing the operational significance of these quantities. Moreover, we show that in this setting, again similarly to the finite-dimensional case, the sandwiched Rényi divergences coincide with the regularized measured Rényi divergences, another distinctive feature of the former quantities. Our main tool is an approximation theorem (martingale convergence) for the sandwiched Rényi divergences, which may be used for the extension of various further results from the finite-dimensional to the von Neumann algebra setting. We also initiate the study of the sandwiched Rényi divergences of pairs of states on a $C^*$-algebra, and show that the above operational interpretation, as well as the equality to the regularized measured Rényi divergence, holds more generally for pairs of states on a nuclear $C^*$-algebra.

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arXiv2022

Test-measured Rényi divergences

One possibility of defining a quantum Rényi $α$-divergence of two quantum states is to optimize the classical Rényi $α$-divergence of their post-measurement probability distributions over all possible measurements (measured Rényi divergence), and maybe regularize these quantities over multiple copies of the two states (regularized measured Rényi $α$-divergence). A key observation behind the theorem for the strong converse exponent of asymptotic binary quantum state discrimination is that the regularized measured Rényi $α$-divergence coincides with the sandwiched Rényi $α$-divergence when $α>1$. Moreover, it also follows from the same theorem that to achieve this, it is sufficient to consider $2$-outcome measurements (tests) for any number of copies (this is somewhat surprising, as achieving the measured Rényi $α$-divergence for $n$ copies might require a number of measurement outcomes that diverges in $n$, in general). In view of this, it seems natural to expect the same when $α<1$; however, we show that this is not the case. In fact, we show that even for commuting states (classical case) the regularized quantity attainable using $2$-outcome measurements is in general strictly smaller than the Rényi $α$-divergence (which is unique in the classical case). In the general quantum case this shows that the above "regularized test-measured" Rényi $α$-divergence is not even a quantum extension of the classical Rényi divergence when $α<1$, in sharp contrast to the $α>1$ case.

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arXiv2022

The strong converse exponent of discriminating infinite-dimensional quantum states

The sandwiched Rényi divergences of two finite-dimensional density operators quantify their asymptotic distinguishability in the strong converse domain. This establishes the sandwiched Rényi divergences as the operationally relevant ones among the infinitely many quantum extensions of the classical Rényi divergences for Rényi parameter $α>1$. The known proof of this goes by showing that the sandwiched Rényi divergence coincides with the regularized measured Rényi divergence, which in turn is proved by asymptotic pinching, a fundamentally finite-dimensional technique. Thus, while the notion of the sandwiched Rényi divergences was extended recently to density operators on an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space (even for states of a von Neumann algebra), these quantities were so far lacking an operational interpretation similar to the finite-dimensional case, and it has also been open whether they coincide with the regularized measured Rényi divergences. In this paper we fill this gap by answering both questions in the positive for density operators on an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space, using a simple finite-dimensional approximation technique. We also initiate the study of the sandwiched Rényi divergences, and the related problem of the strong converse exponent, for pairs of positive semi-definite operators that are not necessarily trace-class. This is interesting from the purely mathematical point of view of extending the concept of Rényi (and other) divergences to settings beyond the standard one of positive trace-class operators (positive normal functionals in the von Neumann algebra setting). In this spirit, we also discuss the definition and some properties of the more general family of Rényi $(α,z)$-divergences of positive semi-definite operators on an infinite-dimensional separable Hilbert space.

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arXiv2022

Super-exponential distinguishability of correlated quantum states

In the problem of asymptotic binary i.i.d. state discrimination, the optimal asymptotics of the type I and the type II error probabilities is in general an exponential decrease to zero as a function of the number of samples; the set of achievable exponent pairs is characterized by the quantum Hoeffding bound theorem. A super-exponential decrease for both types of error probabilities is only possible in the trivial case when the two states are orthogonal, and hence can be perfectly distinguished using only a single copy of the system. In this paper we show that a qualitatively different behaviour can occur when there is correlation between the samples. Namely, we use gauge-invariant and translation-invariant quasi-free states on the algebra of the canonical anti-commutation relations to exhibit pairs of states on an infinite spin chain with the properties that a) all finite-size restrictions of the states have invertible density operators, and b) the type I and the type II error probabilities both decrease to zero at least with the speed $e^{-nc\log n}$ with some positive constant $c$, i.e., with a super-exponential speed in the sample size $n$. Particular examples of such states include the ground states of the $XX$ model corresponding to different transverse magnetic fields. In fact, we prove our result in the setting of binary composite hypothesis testing, and hence it can be applied to prove super-exponential distinguishability of the hypotheses that the transverse magnetic field is above a certain threshold vs. that it is below a strictly lower value.

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arXiv2021

On the error exponents of binary state discrimination with composite hypotheses

The trade-off between the two types of errors in binary state discrimination may be quantified in the asymptotics by various error exponents. In the case of simple i.i.d. hypotheses, each of these exponents is equal to a divergence (pseudo-distance) of the two states. In the case of composite hypotheses, represented by sets of states $R,S$, one always has the inequality $\mathrm{e}(R\|S)\le \mathrm{E}(R\|S)$, where $\mathrm{e}$ is the exponent, $\mathrm{E}$ is the corresponding divergence, and the question is whether equality holds. The relation between the composite exponents and the worst pairwise exponents may be influenced by a number of factors: the type of exponents considered; whether the problem is classical or quantum; the cardinality and the geometric properties of the sets representing the hypotheses; and, on top of the above, possibly whether the underlying Hilbert space is finite- or infinite-dimensional. Our main contribution in this paper is clarifying this landscape considerably: We exhibit explicit examples for hitherto unstudied cases where the above inequality fails to hold with equality, while we also prove equality for various general classes of state discrimination problems. In particular, we show that equality may fail for any of the error exponents even in the classical case, if the system is allowed to be infinite-dimensional, and the alternative hypothesis contains countably infinitely many states. Moreover, we show that in the quantum case strict inequality is the generic behavior in the sense that, starting from any pair of non-commuting density operators of any dimension, and for any of the exponents, it is possible to construct an example with a simple null-hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis consisting of only two states, such that strict inequality holds for the given exponent.

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arXiv2020

Divergence radii and the strong converse exponent of classical-quantum channel coding with constant compositions

There are different inequivalent ways to define the Rényi capacity of a channel for a fixed input distribution $P$. In a 1995 paper Csiszár has shown that for classical discrete memoryless channels there is a distinguished such quantity that has an operational interpretation as a generalized cutoff rate for constant composition channel coding. We show that the analogous notion of Rényi capacity, defined in terms of the sandwiched quantum Rényi divergences, has the same operational interpretation in the strong converse problem of classical-quantum channel coding. Denoting the constant composition strong converse exponent for a memoryless classical-quantum channel $W$ with composition $P$ and rate $R$ as $sc(W,R,P)$, our main result is that \[ sc(W,R,P)=\sup_{α>1}\frac{α-1}α\left[R-χ_α^*(W,P)\right], \] where $χ_α^*(W,P)$ is the $P$-weighted sandwiched Rényi divergence radius of the image of the channel.

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arXiv2016

Two approaches to obtain the strong converse exponent of quantum hypothesis testing for general sequences of quantum states

We present two general approaches to obtain the strong converse rate of quantum hypothesis testing for correlated quantum states. One approach requires that the states satisfy a certain factorization property; typical examples of such states are the temperature states of translation-invariant finite-range interactions on a spin chain. The other approach requires the differentiability of a regularized Rényi $α$-divergence in the parameter $α$; typical examples of such states include temperature states of non-interacting fermionic lattice systems, and classical irreducible Markov chains. In all cases, we get that the strong converse exponent is equal to the Hoeffding anti-divergence, which in turn is obtained from the regularized Rényi divergences of the two states.

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arXiv2016

Coding theorems for compound problems via quantum Rényi divergences

Recently, a new notion of quantum Rényi divergences has been introduced by Müller-Lennert, Dupuis, Szehr, Fehr and Tomamichel, J.Math.Phys. 54:122203, (2013), and Wilde, Winter, Yang, Commun.Math.Phys. 331:593--622, (2014), that has found a number of applications in strong converse theorems. Here we show that these new Rényi divergences are also useful tools to obtain coding theorems in the direct domain of various problems. We demonstrate this by giving new and considerably simplified proofs for the achievability parts of Stein's lemma with composite null hypothesis, universal state compression, and the classical capacity of compound classical-quantum channels, based on single-shot error bounds already available in the literature, and simple properties of the quantum Rényi divergences. The novelty of our proofs is that the composite/compound coding theorems can be almost directly obtained from the single-shot error bounds, with essentially the same effort as for the case of simple null-hypothesis/single source/single channel.

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arXiv2016

Strong converse exponents for a quantum channel discrimination problem and quantum-feedback-assisted communication

This paper studies the difficulty of discriminating between an arbitrary quantum channel and a "replacer" channel that discards its input and replaces it with a fixed state. We show that, in this particular setting, the most general adaptive discrimination strategies provide no asymptotic advantage over non-adaptive tensor-power strategies. This conclusion follows by proving a quantum Stein's lemma for this channel discrimination setting, showing that a constant bound on the Type I error leads to the Type II error decreasing to zero exponentially quickly at a rate determined by the maximum relative entropy registered between the channels. The strong converse part of the lemma states that any attempt to make the Type II error decay to zero at a rate faster than the channel relative entropy implies that the Type I error necessarily converges to one. We then refine this latter result by identifying the optimal strong converse exponent for this task. As a consequence of these results, we can establish a strong converse theorem for the quantum-feedback-assisted capacity of a channel, sharpening a result due to Bowen. Furthermore, our channel discrimination result demonstrates the asymptotic optimality of a non-adaptive tensor-power strategy in the setting of quantum illumination, as was used in prior work on the topic. The sandwiched Renyi relative entropy is a key tool in our analysis. Finally, by combining our results with recent results of Hayashi and Tomamichel, we find a novel operational interpretation of the mutual information of a quantum channel N as the optimal type II error exponent when discriminating between a large number of independent instances of N and an arbitrary "worst-case" replacer channel chosen from the set of all replacer channels.

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arXiv2014

Upper bounds on the error probabilities and asymptotic error exponents in quantum multiple state discrimination

We consider the multiple hypothesis testing problem for symmetric quantum state discrimination between r given states σ_1,...,σ_r. By splitting up the overall test into multiple binary tests in various ways we obtain a number of upper bounds on the optimal error probability in terms of the binary error probabilities. These upper bounds allow us to deduce various bounds on the asymptotic error rate, for which it has been hypothesised that it is given by the multi-hypothesis quantum Chernoff bound (or Chernoff divergence) C(σ_1,...,σ_r), as recently introduced by Nussbaum and Szkoła in analogy with Salikhov's classical multi-hypothesis Chernoff bound. This quantity is defined as the minimum of the pairwise binary Chernoff divergences min_{j<k}C(σ_j,σ_k). It was known already that the optimal asymptotic rate must lie between C/3 and C, and that for certain classes of sets of states the bound is actually achieved. It was known to be achieved, in particular, when the state pair that is closest together in Chernoff divergence is more than 6 times closer than the next closest pair. Our results improve on this in two ways. Firstly, we show that the optimal asymptotic rate must lie between C/2 and C. Secondly, we show that the Chernoff bound is already achieved when the closest state pair is more than 2 times closer than the next closest pair. We also show that the Chernoff bound is achieved when at least $r-2$ of the states are pure, improving on a previous result by Nussbaum and Szkoła. Finally, we indicate a number of potential pathways along which a proof (or disproof) may eventually be found that the multi-hypothesis quantum Chernoff bound is always achieved.

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