Rényi Information Complexity and an Information Theoretic Characterization of the Partition Bound

Abstract: We introduce a new information-theoretic complexity measure $IC_\infty$ for 2-party functions which is a lower-bound on communication complexity, and has the two leading lower-bounds on communication complexity as its natural relaxations: (external) information complexity ($IC$) and logarithm of partition complexity ($\text{prt}$), which have so far appeared conceptually quite different from each other. $IC_\infty$ is an external information complexity measure based on R\'enyi mutual information of order infinity. In the definition of $IC_\infty$, relaxing the order of R\'enyi mutual information from infinity to 1 yields $IC$, while $\log \text{prt}$ is obtained by replacing protocol transcripts with what we term "pseudotranscripts," which omits the interactive nature of a protocol, but only requires that the probability of any transcript given the inputs $x$ and $y$ to the two parties, factorizes into two terms which depend on $x$ and $y$ separately. Further understanding $IC_\infty$ might have consequences for important direct-sum problems in communication complexity, as it lies between communication complexity and information complexity. We also show that applying both the above relaxations simultaneously to $IC_\infty$ gives a complexity measure that is lower-bounded by the (log of) relaxed partition complexity, a complexity measure introduced by Kerenidis et al. (FOCS 2012). We obtain a sharper connection between (external) information complexity and relaxed partition complexity than Kerenidis et al., using an arguably more direct proof.