Derivatives of Quantum Randomness: Separating Pseudorandom Unitaries from Pseudorandom (Function-like) States

2026-09-13

AI Summary

本文通过研究伪随机单元的导数，揭示了量子状态与量子单元之间伪随机性的根本区别，并展示了即使是最强的状态概念也不能暗示最弱的单元概念。

Abstract

Quantum computation gives rise to new pseudorandom primitives for states and unitaries, including pseudorandom state generators (PRSGs), pseudorandom function-like state generators (PRFSGs), and pseudorandom unitaries (PRUs). In this paper, we show a full unitary oracle separation between PRFSGs and PRUs. The separation holds between the strongest state notion and the weakest unitary notion: even adaptively secure, quantum-accessible PRFSGs do not imply non-adaptively secure, forward-only PRUs, even when their implementations are allowed to be non-unitary and use an arbitrary number of ancillary qubits. This reveals a fundamental distinction between pseudorandomness for quantum states and for quantum unitaries. Our main technical idea is to view a candidate PRU construction with access to state generation oracles as a map from the underlying oracle states to implemented unitaries, and to study the derivatives of this map. These derivatives are inherently low rank, and we exploit this low-rank structure to distinguish the resulting unitaries from truly random ones. We believe this differential perspective may be useful for studying other structural questions about quantum states and unitaries.

Problem

• Quantum Randomness
• Pseudorandom Unitaries
• Pseudorandom Function-like States

Innovation

• pseudorandom unitaries
• pseudorandom function-like state generators
• quantum randomness
• derivative analysis
• low-rank structure