Quantum channel coding: Approximation algorithms and strong converse exponents

Quantum 9, 1877 (2025).

https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2025-10-06-1877

We study relaxations of entanglement-assisted quantum channel coding and establish that non-signaling assistance and a natural semi-definite programming relaxation — termed meta-converse — are equivalent in terms of success probabilities. We then present a rounding procedure that transforms any non-signaling-assisted strategy into an entanglement-assisted one and prove an approximation ratio of $(1 – e^{-1})$ in success probabilities for the special case of measurement channels. For fully quantum channels, we give a weaker (dimension dependent) approximation ratio, that is nevertheless still tight to characterize the strong converse exponent of entanglement-assisted channel coding [Li and Yao, IEEE Tran. Inf. Theory (2024)]. Our derivations leverage ideas from position-based coding, quantum decoupling theorems, the matrix Chernoff inequality, and input flattening techniques.