Test-measured R\'enyi divergences
Abstract
One possibility of defining a quantum R\'enyi -divergence of two quantum states is to optimize the classical R\'enyi -divergence of their post-measurement probability distributions over all possible measurements (measured R\'enyi divergence), and maybe regularize these quantities over multiple copies of the two states (regularized measured R\'enyi -divergence). A key observation behind the theorem for the strong converse exponent of asymptotic binary quantum state discrimination is that the regularized measured R\'enyi -divergence coincides with the sandwiched R\'enyi -divergence when . Moreover, it also follows from the same theorem that to achieve this, it is sufficient to consider -outcome measurements (tests) for any number of copies (this is somewhat surprising, as achieving the measured R\'enyi -divergence for copies might require a number of measurement outcomes that diverges in , in general). In view of this, it seems natural to expect the same when ; 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 -outcome measurements is in general strictly smaller than the R\'enyi -divergence (which is unique in the classical case). In the general quantum case this shows that the above "regularized test-measured" R\'enyi -divergence is not even a quantum extension of the classical R\'enyi divergence when , in sharp contrast to the case.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2201.05477,
title = {Test-measured R\'enyi divergences},
author = {Milán Mosonyi and Fumio Hiai},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.05477},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
v3: 30 pages, minor improvements. Thanks to a comment by an anonymous reviewer, we can now show that the two different ways to regularize the test-measured R\'enyi $\alpha$-divergence lead to different quantities