Coding theorems for compound problems via quantum R\'enyi divergences

Abstract

Recently, a new notion of quantum R\'enyi divergences has been introduced by M\"uller-Lennert, Dupuis, Szehr, Fehr and Tomamichel, J.Math.Phys. 54:122203, (2013), and Wilde, Winter, Yang, Commun.Math.Phys. 331:593--622, (2014), that has found a number of applications in strong converse theorems. Here we show that these new R\'enyi divergences are also useful tools to obtain coding theorems in the direct domain of various problems. We demonstrate this by giving new and considerably simplified proofs for the achievability parts of Stein's lemma with composite null hypothesis, universal state compression, and the classical capacity of compound classical-quantum channels, based on single-shot error bounds already available in the literature, and simple properties of the quantum R\'enyi divergences. The novelty of our proofs is that the composite/compound coding theorems can be almost directly obtained from the single-shot error bounds, with essentially the same effort as for the case of simple null-hypothesis/single source/single channel.