SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Sohail Sarkar

Publications and source records attributed to Sohail Sarkar.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

Coherent Swap Regret and Channel-Proof Learning

External regret certifies stability only against replacing one's behavior by a fixed alternative. In a quantum game, this misses a natural physical move: a player can apply a local completely positive trace-preserving (CPTP) map to the state it actually received or prepared. We introduce coherent swap regret as the regret benchmark against all such local CPTP deviations, and give an algorithm achieving $O(\sqrt{dT\log d})$ coherent swap regret via entropic mirror ascent on the CPTP Choi slice with a fixed-point play rule. The main result is a three-level deviation-class landscape. Replacement channels recover ordinary external regret at rate $\Theta(\sqrt{T\log d})$. Unital channels, including unitary deviations and mixtures of unitaries, have zero minimax regret. Deterministic measurement-and-preparation channels already force $\Omega(\sqrt{dT\log d})$ regret in the moderate-horizon regime, and this rate is also sufficient for all CPTP deviations. Thus the hardness comes from non-unital use of the recommendation register, not from quantum coherence alone. As an application, decentralized full-information learning in finite quantum games reaches an $\varepsilon$-approximate separable quantum correlated equilibrium after $T=O(\max_i d_i\log d_i/\varepsilon^2)$ rounds. We identify these equilibria with channel-proofness of mediated quantum recommendation protocols, give an SDP audit for local CPTP exploitability applicable to arbitrary finite-dimensional states, and include a probing-bandit extension with pseudo-regret $O(d^{4/3}T^{2/3}(\log d)^{1/3})$ under Haar-random pure-state probes.

quant-ph

Visibility cliques, cubic containers, and dense orchard cores

The Big-Line-Big-Clique Conjecture of Kara, Por and Wood asserts that, for every fixed $k$ and $\ell$, every sufficiently large finite planar point set contains either $k$ collinear points or $\ell$ pairwise visible points. We prove a quantitative form in two structured regimes and isolate the precise ambient obstruction to the full conjecture. The main result is a deterministic cubic-container theorem. If $A \subset \mathbb{R}^2$ has $n$ points, no $k$ collinear points, and all but $s$ points of $A$ lie on a real cubic, then the cubic-supported part of $A$ has a visible clique cover of size $O_k(s+1)$; in particular $V(A)$ contains a clique of size $\Omega_k(n/(s+1))$, unless the cubic is the excluded three-line case containing only $O_k(1)$ points. Combining this with the Green-Tao structure theorem, we obtain that every $n$-point set with no $k$ collinear points and at most $Kn$ ordinary lines contains a visible clique of size $\Omega_{k,K}(n)$; more strongly, all but $O_K(1)$ points can be partitioned into $O_{k,K}(1)$ mutually visible sets. We also combine the cubic-container theorem with the Elekes-Szabo theorem on triple lines and cubic curves to prove the Big-Line-Big-Clique conclusion for point sets contained in any fixed irreducible algebraic curve. Finally, we prove a dense-orchard core lemma showing that the absence of a visible $K_\ell$ forces a positive-density subset in which every point lies on linearly many 3-rich lines, and we give a sharp one-blocker example showing why ambient blockers cannot be ignored.

math.CO