Bound Entanglement Is Insufficient for an Exponential Quantum Learning Advantage

Abstract

While entanglement is known to enable exponential improvements in the sample complexity of quantum learning, it remains unclear which properties of entangled resources are responsible for such improvements. We address this question through the reduction criterion, a condition obeyed by all bound-entangled states. In $n$-qubit Pauli-channel learning, we show that restricting either the input states or the measurement effects to satisfy this criterion rules out an exponential advantage for incoherent adaptive protocols. An exponential lower bound persists for the one-sided coherent adaptive protocols considered here, even when the unrestricted side retains quantum correlations across channel uses. Using conditional min-entropy, we further quantify how the sample-complexity lower bounds weaken as larger violations of the reduction criterion are allowed. Finally, we show that the same obstruction appears in conjugate-state learning: restricted joint measurements cannot reproduce the logarithmic-sample advantage of unrestricted joint measurements on $ρ\otimesρ^*$. These results identify violation of the reduction criterion as a necessary condition for an exponential advantage in the learning tasks considered here.