Quantum channel coding: Approximation algorithms and strong converse exponents

Aadil Oufkir1,2 and Mario Berta2

1The UM6P Vanguard Center, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Rocade Rabat-Salé, Technopolis, Morocco
2Institute for Quantum Information, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

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Abstract

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.

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Cited by

[1] Aadil Oufkir, Marco Tomamichel, and Mario Berta, "Error exponent of activated non-signaling-assisted classical-quantum channel coding", Letters in Mathematical Physics 116 2, 33 (2026).

[2] Hao-Chung Cheng and Po-Chieh Liu, "Error Exponents for Quantum Packing Problems via An Operator Layer Cake Theorem", arXiv:2507.06232, (2025).

[3] Idris Delsol, Omar Fawzi, Jan Kochanowski, and Akshay Ramachandran, "Computational aspects of the trace norm contraction coefficient", arXiv:2507.16737, (2025).

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