Sreejith Sreekumar | Search arXiv

arXiv2026

Quantum Maximum Likelihood Prediction via Hilbert Space Embeddings

Maximum likelihood prediction (MLP) is a core task at the heart of modern large language models. Here, we study a quantum version of this task for a simplified data model consisting of independent and identically distributed samples, as a first step. The quantum maximum likelihood predictor (QMLP) is obtained by embedding of empirical probability distributions into quantum states and performing a minimization of quantum relative entropy over a given class of states. We derive non-asymptotic performance guarantees for QMLP in terms of convergence rates and concentration inequalities, both in trace norm and quantum relative entropy. Our approach provides a unified framework to handle MLP within both classical and quantum LLMs. We also consider the related problem of quantum information projection and generalize the quantum Pythagorean theorem to mixture families specified by possibly non-self-adjoint linear constraints. We further show that the Pythagorean inequality continues to hold in the infinite-dimensional setting whenever the convex information-projection problem attains a finite minimum.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2026

Distributed Quantum Hypothesis Testing under Zero-rate Communication Constraints

The trade-offs between error probabilities in quantum hypothesis testing are by now well-understood in the centralized setting, but much less is known for distributed settings. Here, we study a distributed binary hypothesis testing problem to infer a bipartite quantum state shared between two remote parties, where one of these parties communicates to the tester at (asymptotic) zero-rate, while the other party communicates to the tester at zero-rate or higher. As our main contribution, we derive an efficiently computable single-letter formula for the Stein's exponent of this problem, when the state under the alternative is the product of their marginals. For proving the converse direction of our result, we utilize a novel technique based on reverse hypercontractivity of a quantum markov semigroup combined with the pinching method. For the general case with vanishing type I error probability, we show that the Stein's exponent when (at least) one of the parties communicates classically at zero-rate is given by a multi-letter expression involving regularized measured relative entropy maximized over a sub-class of binary outcome separable measurements. When the state under the alternative commutes with a product eigenbasis of the marginal states under the null and has a larger support, we show that the exponent is characterized as a max-min optimization of regularized measured relative entropy over a sub-class of local binary outcome projective measurements. While this expression becomes single-letter for the fully classical case, we further prove that this already does not happen in the same way for classical-quantum states in general. The converse proof of the max-min characterization relies on an extension of the classical blowing-up lemma to bipartite quantum states satisfying the aforementioned commutativity condition, which could be of independent interest.

quant-ph↗