This paper studies a generalization of multi-prover interactive proofs in which a verifier interacts with two competing teams of provers: one team attempts to convince the verifier to accept while the other attempts to convince the verifier to reject
. Each team consists of two provers who jointly implement a no-signaling strategy. No-signaling strategies are a curious class of joint strategy that cannot in general be implemented without communication between the provers, yet cannot be used as a black box to establish communication between them. Attention is restricted in this paper to two-turn interactions in which the verifier asks questions of each of the four provers and decides whether to accept or reject based on their responses. We prove that the complexity class of decision problems that admit two-turn interactive proofs with competing teams of no-signaling provers is a subset of PSPACE. This upper bound matches existing PSPACE lower bounds on the following two disparate and weaker classes of interactive proof: 1. Two-turn multi-prover interactive proofs with only one team of no-signaling provers. 2. Two-turn competing-prover interactive proofs with only one prover per team. Our result implies that the complexity of these two models is unchanged by the addition of a second competing team of no-signaling provers in the first case and by the addition of a second no-signaling prover to each team in the second case. Moreover, our result unifies and subsumes prior PSPACE upper bounds on these classes.
This paper presents an efficient parallel approximation scheme for a new class of min-max problems. The algorithm is derived from the matrix multiplicative weights update method and can be used to find near-optimal strategies for competitive two-part
y classical or quantum interactions in which a referee exchanges any number of messages with one party followed by any number of additional messages with the other. It considerably extends the class of interactions which admit parallel solutions, demonstrating for the first time the existence of a parallel algorithm for an interaction in which one party reacts adaptively to the other. As a consequence, we prove that several competing-provers complexity classes collapse to PSPACE such as QRG(2), SQG and two new classes called DIP and DQIP. A special case of our result is a parallel approximation scheme for a specific class of semidefinite programs whose feasible region consists of lists of semidefinite matrices that satisfy a transcript-like consistency condition. Applied to this special case, our algorithm yields a direct polynomial-space simulation of multi-message quantum interactive proofs resulting in a first-principles proof of QIP=PSPACE.
The present paper studies an operator norm that captures the distinguishability of quantum strategies in the same sense that the trace norm captures the distinguishability of quantum states or the diamond norm captures the distinguishability of quant
um channels. Characterizations of its unit ball and dual norm are established via strong duality of a semidefinite optimization problem. A full, formal proof of strong duality is presented for the semidefinite optimization problem in question. This norm and its properties are employed to generalize a state discrimination result of Ref. [GW05]. The generalized result states that for any two convex sets S,T of strategies there exists a fixed interactive measurement scheme that successfully distinguishes any choice of s in S from any choice of t in T with bias proportional to the minimal distance between the sets S and T as measured by this norm. A similar discrimination result for channels then follows as a special case.
This thesis is divided into two parts. In Part I we introduce a new formalism for quantum strategies, which specify the actions of one party in any multi-party interaction involving the exchange of multiple quantum messages among the parties. This fo
rmalism associates with each strategy a single positive semidefinite operator acting only upon the tensor product of the input and output message spaces for the strategy. We establish three fundamental properties of this new representation for quantum strategies and we list several applications, including a quantum version of von Neumanns celebrated 1928 Min-Max Theorem for zero-sum games and an efficient algorithm for computing the value of such a game. In Part II we establish several properties of a class of quantum operations that can be implemented locally with shared quantum entanglement or classical randomness. In particular, we establish the existence of a ball of local operations with shared randomness lying within the space spanned by the no-signaling operations and centred at the completely noisy channel. The existence of this ball is employed to prove that the weak membership problem for local operations with shared entanglement is strongly NP-hard. We also provide characterizations of local operations in terms of linear functionals that are positive and completely positive on a certain cone of Hermitian operators, under a natural notion of complete positivity appropriate to that cone. We end the thesis with a discussion of the properties of no-signaling quantum operations.
We prove an explicit upper bound on the amount of entanglement required by any strategy in a two-player cooperative game with classical questions and quantum answers. Specifically, we show that every strategy for a game with n-bit questions and n-qub
it answers can be implemented exactly by players who share an entangled state of no more than 5n qubits--a bound which is optimal to within a factor of 5/2. Previously, no upper bound at all was known on the amount of entanglement required even to approximate such a strategy. It follows that the problem of computing the value of these games is in NP, whereas previously this problem was not known to be computable.
Multi-party local quantum operations with shared quantum entanglement or shared classical randomness are studied. The following facts are established: (i) There is a ball of local operations with shared randomness lying within the space spanned by
the no-signaling operations and centred at the completely noisy channel. (ii) The existence of the ball of local operations with shared randomness is employed to prove that the weak membership problem for local operations with shared entanglement is strongly NP-hard. (iii) Local operations with shared entanglement are characterized in terms of linear functionals that are ``completely positive on a certain cone K of separable Hermitian operators, under a natural notion of complete positivity appropriate to that cone. Local operations with shared randomness (but not entanglement) are also characterized in terms of linear functionals that are merely positive on that same cone K. (iv) Existing characterizations of no-signaling operations are generalized to the multi-party setting and recast in terms of the Choi-Jamiolkowski representation for quantum super-operators. It is noted that the standard nonlocal box is an example of a no-signaling operation that is separable, yet cannot be implemented by local operations with shared entanglement.
