Strong converse bounds in quantum network information theory: distributed hypothesis testing and source coding

Abstract: We consider a distributed quantum hypothesis testing problem with communication constraints, in which the two hypotheses correspond to two different states of a bipartite quantum system, multiple identical copies of which are shared between Alice and Bob. They are allowed to perform local operations on their respective systems and send quantum information to Charlie at limited rates. By doing measurements on the systems that he receives, Charlie needs to infer which of the two different states the original bipartite state was in, that is, which of the two hypotheses is true. We prove that the Stein exponent for this problem is given by a regularized quantum relative entropy. The latter reduces to a single letter formula when the alternative hypothesis consists of the products of the marginals of the null hypothesis, and there is no rate constraint imposed on Bob. Our proof relies on certain properties of the so-called quantum information bottleneck function. The second part of this paper concerns the general problem of finding finite blocklength strong converse bounds in quantum network information theory. In the classical case, the analogue of this problem has been reformulated in terms of the so-called image size characterization problem. Here, we extend this problem to the classical-quantum setting and prove a second order strong converse bound for it. As a by-product, we obtain a similar bound for the Stein exponent for distributed hypothesis testing in the special case in which the bipartite system is a classical-quantum system, as well as for the task of quantum source coding with compressed classical side information. Our proofs use a recently developed tool from quantum functional inequalities, namely, the tensorization property of reverse hypercontractivity for the quantum depolarizing semigroup.