A distributed binary hypothesis testing (HT) problem involving two parties, one referred to as the observer and the other as the detector is studied. The observer observes a discrete memoryless source (DMS) and communicates its observations to the detector over a discrete memoryless channel (DMC). The detector observes another DMS correlated with that at the observer, and performs a binary HT on the joint distribution of the two DMS’s using its own observed data and the information received from the observer. The trade-off between the type I error probability and the type II error-exponent of the HT is explored. Single-letter lower bounds on the optimal type II errorexponent are obtained by using two different coding schemes, a separate HT and channel coding scheme and a joint HT and channel coding scheme based on hybrid coding for the matched bandwidth case. Exact single-letter characterization of the same is established for the special case of testing against conditional independence, and it is shown to be achieved by the separate HT and channel coding scheme. An example is provided where the joint scheme achieves a strictly better performance than the separation based scheme.

Entropy measures quantify the amount of information and correlation present in a quantum system. In practice, when the quantum state is unknown and only copies thereof are available, one must resort to the estimation of such entropy measures. Here we propose a variational quantum algorithm for estimating the von Neumann and Rényi entropies, as well as the measured relative entropy and measured Rényi relative entropy. Our approach first parametrizes a variational formula for the measure of interest by a quantum circuit and a classical neural network and then optimizes the resulting objective over parameter space. Numerical simulations of our quantum algorithm are provided, using a noiseless quantum simulator. The algorithm provides accurate estimates of the various entropy measures for the examples tested, which renders it a promising approach for usage in downstream tasks.

A distributed binary hypothesis testing (HT) problem involving two parties, a remote observer and a detector, is studied. The remote observer has access to a discrete memoryless source, and communicates its observations to the detector via a rate-limited noiseless channel. The detector observes another discrete memoryless source, and performs a binary hypothesis test on the joint distribution of its own observations with those of the observer. While the goal of the observer is to maximize the type II error exponent of the test for a given type I error probability constraint, it also wants to keep a private part of its observations as oblivious to the detector as possible. Considering both equivocation and average distortion under a causal disclosure assumption as possible measures of privacy, the trade-off between the communication rate from the observer to the detector, the type II error exponent, and privacy is studied. For the general HT problem, we establish single-letter inner bounds on both the rate-error exponent-equivocation and rate-error exponent-distortion trade-offs. Subsequently, single-letter characterizations for both trade-offs are obtained (i) for testing against conditional independence of the observer’s observations from those of the detector, given some additional side information at the detector; and (ii) when the communication rate constraint over the channel is zero. Finally, we show by providing a counter-example where the strong converse which holds for distributed HT without a privacy constraint does not hold when a privacy constraint is imposed. This implies that in general, the rate-error exponent-equivocation and rate-error exponent-distortion trade-offs are not independent of the type I error probability constraint.

A distributed binary hypothesis testing problem, in which multiple observers transmit their observations to a detector over noisy channels, is studied. Together with its own observations, the goal of the detector is to decide between two hypotheses for the joint distribution of the data. Single-letter upper and lower bounds on the optimal type 2 error exponent (T2-EE), when the type 1 error probability vanishes with the block-length are obtained. These bounds coincide and characterize the optimal T2-EE when only a single helper is involved. Our result shows that the optimal T2-EE depends on the marginal distributions of the data and the channels rather than their joint distribution. However, an operational separation between HT and channel coding does not hold, and the optimal T2-EE is achieved by generating channel inputs correlated with observed data.

Traditionally, the capacity region of a coherent fading multiple access channel (MAC) is analyzed in two popular contexts. In the first, a centralized system with full channel state information at the transmitters (CSITs) is assumed, and the transmit power and data-rate can be jointly chosen for every fading vector realization. On the other hand, in fast-fading links with distributed CSIT, the lack of full CSI is compensated by performing ergodic averaging over sufficiently many channel realizations. Notice that the distributed CSI may necessitate decentralized power-control for optimal data-transfer. Apart from these two models, the case of slow-fading links and distributed CSIT, though relevant to many systems, has received much less attention. In this paper, a block-fading additive white Gaussian noise MAC with full CSI at the receiver and distributed CSI at the transmitters is considered. The links undergo independent fading, but otherwise have arbitrary fading distributions. The channel statistics and respective long-term average transmit powers are known to all parties. We first consider the case where each encoder has knowledge only of its own link quality, and not of others. For this model, we compute the adaptive capacity region, i.e., the collection of average rate-tuples under blockwise coding/decoding such that the rate-tuple for every fading realization is inside the instantaneous MAC capacity region. The key step in our solution is an optimal rate allocation function for any given set of distributed power control laws at the transmitters. This also allows us to structurally characterize the optimal power control for a wide class of fading models. Further extensions are also proposed for the case where each encoder has additional partial CSI about the other links.

f -divergences, which quantify discrepancy between probability distributions, are ubiquitous in information theory, machine learning, and statistics. While there are numerous methods for estimating f -divergences from data, a limit distribution theory, which quantifies fluctuations of the estimation error, is largely obscure. As limit theorems are pivotal for valid statistical inference, to close this gap, we develop a general methodology for deriving distributional limits for f -divergences based on the functional delta method and Hadamard directional differentiability. Focusing on four prominent f -divergences— Kullback-Leibler divergence, χ ² divergence, squared Hellinger distance, and total variation distance—we identify sufficient conditions on the population distributions for the existence of distributional limits and characterize the limiting variables. These results are used to derive one- and two-sample limit theorems for Gaussian-smoothed f -divergences, both under the null and the alternative. Finally, an application of the limit distribution theory to auditing differential privacy is proposed and analyzed for significance level and power against local alternatives.