Entanglement assisted communication complexity measured by distinguishability

Abstract

We investigate the quantum advantage that can arise in typical two-party communication scenarios, where the sender and the receiver are allowed to share prior correlations. Focusing on communication tasks constrained by the distinguishability of the sender's inputs, we demonstrate that entanglement-assisted communication with both classical and quantum message can outperform classical communication supplemented with shared randomness. We begin by developing a general framework for communication tasks with pre-shared correlations. Within this framework, we establish an equivalence among entanglement-assisted classical communication, entanglement-assisted quantum communication, and quantum communication, showing that no hierarchy exists between these three paradigms. We then investigate the scenario where the receiver has no input and prove that no advantage can arise in this case. However, an advantage in the entanglement-assisted setting emerges once additional constraints are imposed on the dimension of the communicated message. This further highlights the superiority of entanglement-assisted classical communication over standard quantum communication. Then we demonstrate several tasks where the entanglement-assisted protocol using one-bit communication proves to be advantageous over classical communication. Finally, by constructing an explicit class of communication tasks, we show that a non-maximally entangled states outperform the maximally entangled state as a pre-shared resource between the communicating parties.