IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY, VOL. 59, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2013 8057
One-Shot Lossy Quantum Data Compression
Nilanjana Datta, Joseph M. Renes, Renato Renner, and Mark M. Wilde, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—We provide a framework for one-shot quantum rate
distortion coding, in which the goal is to determine the minimum
number of qubits required to compress quantum information as
a function of the probability that the distortion incurred upon
decompression exceeds some specified level. We obtain a one-shot
characterization of the minimum qubit c ompression size for an
entanglement-assisted quantum rate-distortion code in terms of
the smooth max-information, a quantity previously employed in
the one-shot quantum reverse Shannon theorem. Next, we show
how this characterization converges to the known expression for
the entanglement-assisted quantum rate distortion function for
asymptotically many copies of a memoryless q uantum information
source.Finally,wegiveatight,finite blocklength characterization
for the entanglement-assisted minimum qubit compression size
of a memoryless isotropic qubit source subject to an average
symbolwise distortion constraint.
Index Terms—Entanglement assistance, hypothesis testing, rel-
ative entropy, lossy quantum data compression, max-information,
min- and max-entropy, quantum rate distortion.
I. INTRODUCTION
T
HE reliable compression of data is essential for the
efficient use of available storage or communication
resources. In one of the first breakthroughs of quantum infor-
mation th eory, Schumacher [1] proved that the v on Neumann
entropy of a memoryless quantum information source is the op-
timal rate at which we can compress it. This data com pressio n
limit was evaluated under the requirement that the compres-
sion–decompression sch eme is asymptotically lossless,inthe
sense that the information em itted by the source is r ecovered
with arbitrarily good accuracy in the limit of asymptotically
many copies of the source.
Manuscript received April 19, 2013; accepted August 12, 2013. Date of
publication September 26, 2013; date of current version November 19, 2013.
J. M. Renes and R. Renner were supported in part by the Sw iss National
Science Foundation through the National Centre of Competence in Research
“Quantum Science and Technology” under Grant 200020-135048 and in part
by the European Research Council under Grant 258932. M. M. Wilde was
supported by the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques and b y the hospitality
of the Statistical Laboratory at th e University of Cambridge and the Pauli
Center for Theoretical Studies (ETH Zurich) during a research visit in January
and February of 2013, when the majority of this work was com pleted.
N. Datta is with the Statistical Laborator y, University of Cambridge, Cam-
bridge CB30WB, U.K. (e-mail: N.Datta@statslab.cam.ac.uk).
J. M. Renes and R. Renner are with the I nstitute for Theor etical Physics, ETH
Zurich, 8093 Zürich, S witzerland (e-mail: joerenes@gmail.c om; renner@phys .
ethz.ch).
M. M. Wilde was with the School of Compu ter Science, McGill University,
Montreal, QC H3A 2A7, Canada . He is now with the Hearne In stitute for Theo -
retical Physics, Department of Physics and Astronomy, and the Center for Com-
putation and Technology, Louisian a State Universit y, Baton Rouge, LA 70803
USA (e-mail: mwilde@ lsu.edu).
Communicated by A. Holevo, Associate Editor for Quantum Infor mation
Theory.
Dig
ital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIT.2013.2283723
However, one could envisage scenarios in which som e im-
perfection in the recovered information would be tolerable or
even necessary. The characterization of the tradeoff betw een
an allowed distortion and the compression rate is the subject of
quantum rate distortion the or y. Its classical counterpart was de-
veloped by Shannon [2], and the tradeoff is g iven by a rate-dis-
tortion functio n ,whichisdefined as the minimum rate of c om -
pression for a given distortion, w ith r e spect to a s ui tabl y d efi ned
distortion measure. To our know le dge, there are at least two im-
portant reasons for developing the theory of lossy quantum data
compression:
1) O ne might need to com press a quantum information source
at a rate smaller than its von Neumann entropy. This is
necessary, for example, in the case where there is insuf-
ficient storage available, or if one needs to transmit infor-
mation emitted by a source over a channel whose quantum
capacity is sm aller than the von Neumann entropy of the
source. The strong converse to Schumacher’s theorem im-
plies that there is no tradeoff possible betw een the rate
of compression and the error incurred in recovery in the
asymptotic limit (see [3, Th. I.1 9]) . T hat is, there cannot
be a “rate-error” tradeoff because if one compresses at a
rate below the von N eum a nn entropy, then the fi delity be-
tween the initial and recovered state approaches zero ex-
ponentially in the number of cop ies of the source. In spite
of th is “no-go” theorem, the theory of quantum rate dis-
tortion shows that there can be a f undamental tradeoff b e-
tween rate and distor tion for a suitably defined distortion
measure.
2) Allowing a finite distortion in the recovered data is es-
sential for some continu ous-variable quantum inform ation
sources (see [4] and references therein) for w hich the re-
quirement of arbitrarily good accuracy becomes meaning-
less.
1
That is, we would like to have a theory that char-
acterizes the compression of analog quantum information
into digital quantum information along with the distortion
incurred in doing so.
The first paper to discuss rate distortion in the quantum realm
was by Barnum [5]. He introduced a definition of the quan tum
rate-distortion function as the lowest rate at which a sender can
compress a memoryless quantum sou rce u nder som e distortio n
constraint. Th e main result of his paper is a lower bound on the
quantum rate distorti on function in terms of a well-known en -
tropic quantity, n amel y, the coherent informa tio n. Even though
Barnum’s result was t he first in quantum rate distortion theory,
it is unsatisfactory since the bound is ob vio usly loose—the c o-
herent information can be negative, whereas the quantum rate
1
An important exception here is the case of a bosonic thermal source, w hich
has a discrete representation in the orthonormal photon-number basis. Thus,
Schumacher compression of a bosonic thermal source is indeed possible, even
though its representation in the coherent-state basis is continuous.
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