Soft Guessing Under Log-Loss Distortion Allowing Errors

Abstract: This paper deals with the problem of soft guessing under log-loss distortion (logarithmic loss) that was recently investigated by [Wu and Joudeh, IEEE ISIT, pp. 466--471, 2023]. We extend this problem to soft guessing allowing errors, i.e., at each step, a guesser decides whether to stop the guess or not with some probability and if the guesser stops guessing, then the guesser declares an error. We show that the minimal expected value of the cost of guessing under the constraint of the error probability is characterized by the smooth R\'enyi entropy. Furthermore, we carry out an asymptotic analysis for a stationary and memoryless source.