Generalized probabilistic theories (GPT) provide a general framework that includes classical and quantum theories. It is described by a cone $C$ and its dual $C^*$. We show that whether some one-way communication complexity problems can be solved within a GPT is equivalent to the recently introduced cone factorisation of the corresponding communication matrix $M$. We also prove an analogue of Holevos theorem: when the cone $C$ is contained in $mathbb{R}^{n}$, the classical capacity of the channel realised by sending GPT states and measuring them is bounded by $log n$. Polytopes and optimising functions over polytopes arise in many areas of discrete mathematics. A conic extension of a polytope is the intersection of a cone $C$ with an affine subspace whose projection onto the original space yields the desired polytope. Extensions of polytopes can sometimes be much simpler geometric objects than the polytope itself. The existence of a conic extension of a polytope is equivalent to that of a cone factorisation of the slack matrix of the polytope, on the same cone. We show that all $0/1$ polytopes whose vertices can be recognized by a polynomial size circuit, which includes as a special case the travelling salesman polytope and many other polytopes from combinatorial optimisation, have small conic extension complexity when the cone is the completely positive cone. Using recent exponential lower bounds on the linear extension complexity of polytopes, this provides an exponential gap between the communication complexity of GPT based on the completely positive cone and classical communication complexity, and a conjectured exponential gap with quantum communication complexity. Our work thus relates the communication complexity of generalisations of quantum theory to questions of mainstream interest in the area of combinatorial optimisation.
According to quantum theory, the outcomes obtained by measuring an entangled state necessarily exhibit some randomness if they violate a Bell inequality. In particular, a maximal violation of the CHSH inequality guarantees that 1.23 bits of randomness are generated by the measurements. However, by performing measurements with binary outcomes on two subsystems one could in principle generate up to two bits of randomness. We show that correlations that violate arbitrarily little the CHSH inequality or states with arbitrarily little entanglement can be used to certify that close to the maximum of two bits of randomness are produced. Our results show that non-locality, entanglement, and the amount of randomness that can be certified in a Bell-type experiment are inequivalent quantities. From a practical point of view, they imply that device-independent quantum key distribution with optimal key generation rate is possible using almost-local correlations and that device-independent randomness generation with optimal rate is possible with almost-local correlations and with almost-unentangled states.
