quant-phAug 4, 2026

Unifying quantum measurement constructions via a relative-entropy minimum change principle

Authors: Nana LiuMark M. Wilde

Organizations: Institute of Natural Sciences, School of Mathematical Sciences, Ministry of Education Key Laboratory in Scientific and Engineering Computing, and Global College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China · School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14850, USA

Abstract

The minimum change principle provides an information-theoretic characterization of the Bayes reversal channel in classical probability theory and has recently been proposed as a framework for extending Bayes' rule to quantum information theory. Using quantum relative entropy, we investigate a minimum change principle for the setting of quantum statistical inference. Specifically, we consider a forward process based on a classical-to-quantum preparation channel and a reverse process based on a quantum-to-classical measurement channel. We establish a closed-form characterization of measurements that are optimal for this principle, and this optimal measurement can be found via a dual formulation involving a single unconstrained Hermitian variable. This perspective allows us to recover some notable measurements within the same framework, including pretty good measurements and Fermi-Dirac thermal measurements, and we use it to discover a novel family that we call softmin thermal measurements. We further show that softmin thermal measurements arise as optimal solutions to entropy-regularized semidefinite optimization problems, demonstrating that they play a role for measurements analogous to that of thermal states in statistical mechanics. Finally, we prove an additivity property for the relative-entropy minimum change principle and investigate the performance of Fermi-Dirac thermal measurements for quantum hypothesis testing.

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