A Rate-Distortion Perspective on Quantum State Redistribution

We consider a rate-distortion version of the quantum state redistribution task, where the error of the decoded state is judged via an additive distortion measure; it thus constitutes a quantum generalisation of the classical Wyner-Ziv problem. The quantum source is described by a tripartite pure state shared between Alice ($A$, encoder), Bob ($B$, decoder) and a reference ($R$). Both Alice and Bob are required to output a system ($\widetilde{A}$ and $\widetilde{B}$, respectively), and the distortion measure is encoded in an observable on $\widetilde{A}\widetilde{B}R$. It includes as special cases most quantum rate-distortion problems considered in the past, and in particular quantum data compression with the fidelity measured per copy; furthermore, it generalises the well-known state merging and quantum state redistribution tasks for a pure state source, with per-copy fidelity, and a variant recently considered by us, where the source is an ensemble of pure states [ZBK & AW, Proc. ISIT 2020, pp. 1858-1863 and ZBK, PhD thesis, UAB 2020, arXiv:2012.14143]. We derive a single-letter formula for the rate-distortion function of compression schemes assisted by free entanglement. A peculiarity of the formula is that in general it requires optimisation over an unbounded auxiliary register, so the rate-distortion function is not readily computable from our result, and there is a continuity issue at zero distortion. However, we show how to overcome these difficulties in certain situations.