Johannes Jakob Meyer

Our capacity to process information depends on the computational power at our disposal. Information theory captures our ability to distinguish states or communicate messages when it is unconstrained with unrivaled beauty and elegance. For computationally bounded observers the situation is quite different -- they can, for example, be fooled to believe that distributions are more random than they actually are. Existing mathematical approaches in computational information theory largely follow the single-shot paradigm that, while being operationally meaningful, also gives complicated statements and is difficult to build intuition for. In our work, we take a new direction in computational quantum information theory that captures the essence of complexity-constrained information theory while retaining the look and feel of the unbounded asymptotic theory. As our foundational quantity, we define the computational relative entropy as the optimal error exponent in asymmetric hypothesis testing when restricted to polynomially many copies and quantum gates, defined in a mathematically rigorous way. Building on this foundation, we prove a computational analogue of Stein's lemma, establish computational versions of fundamental inequalities like Pinsker's bound, and demonstrate a computational smoothing property showing that computationally indistinguishable states yield equivalent information measures. We derive a computational entropy that operationally characterizes optimal compression rates for quantum states under computational limitations and show that our quantities apply to computational entanglement theory, proving a computational version of the Rains bound. Our framework reveals striking separations between computational and unbounded information measures, including quantum-classical gaps that arise from cryptographic assumptions, demonstrating that computational constraints fundamentally alter the information-theoretic landscape and open new research directions at the intersection of quantum information, complexity theory, and cryptography.

Quantum channel capacities are fundamental to quantum information theory. Their definition, however, does not limit the computational resources of sender and receiver. In this work, we initiate the study of computational quantum capacities. These quantify how much information can be reliably transmitted when imposing the natural requirement that en- and decoding have to be computationally efficient. We focus on the computational two-way quantum capacity and showcase that it is closely related to the computational distillable entanglement of the Choi state of the channel. This connection allows us to show a stark computational capacity separation. Under standard cryptographic assumptions, there exists a quantum channel of polynomial complexity whose computational two-way quantum capacity vanishes while its unbounded counterpart is nearly maximal. More so, we show that there exists a sharp transition in computational quantum capacity from nearly maximal to zero when the channel complexity leaves the polynomial realm. Our results demonstrate that the natural requirement of computational efficiency can radically alter the limits of quantum communication.

Classical shadows are succinct classical representations of quantum states which allow one to encode a set of properties P of a quantum state rho, while only requiring measurements on logarithmically many copies of rho in the size of P. In this work, we initiate the study of verification of classical shadows, denoted classical shadow validity (CSV), from the perspective of computational complexity, which asks: Given a classical shadow S, how hard is it to verify that S predicts the measurement statistics of a quantum state? We first show that even for the elegantly simple classical shadow protocol of [Huang, Kueng, Preskill, Nature Physics 2020] utilizing local Clifford measurements, CSV is QMA-complete. This hardness continues to hold for the high-dimensional extension of said protocol due to [Mao, Yi, and Zhu, PRL 2025]. In contrast, we show that for the HKP and MYZ protocols utilizing global Clifford measurements, CSV can be "dequantized'' for low-rank observables, i.e., solved in randomized poly-time with standard sampling assumptions. Finally, we show that CSV for exponentially many observables is complete for a quantum generalization of the second level of the polynomial hierarchy, yielding the first natural complete problem for such a class.