Quantum interaction can superactivate cheating under parallel repetition
Abstract
We study interactive multiprover games and many-round protocols in which the communication between the verifier and the provers is quantum. Parallel repetition is known to suppress soundness error of classical two-prover games arbitrarily close to zero, as shown by Raz (STOC '95), even with quantum strategies as shown by Yuen (ICALP '16), and Bavarian, Vidick and Yuen (STOC '17). Yet, we show that quantum communication can have the opposite, unexpected effect. Specifically, we exhibit a one-round quantum game and two-round QMIP protocols whose local (unentangled) value is strictly less than one for a single instance, yet equals one under n-fold parallel repetition for every n ≥ 2. The key is that parallel repetition not only imposes additional winning conditions but also supplies additional quantum resources as entanglement in the exchanged states can be exploited jointly across copies. Our multiround examples build on superactivation of zero-error capacities of quantum channels. To establish this connection, we introduce quantum games and interactive protocols which capture the one-shot zero-error classical and quantum capacities, both with and without entanglement assistance. Our constructions use quantum-state verification and a teleportation-based reduction from two rounds to one. In contrast, when shared entanglement is allowed, we show that parallel repetition cannot increase the entangled value when at most $3$ messages are exchanged, consistent with classical results of Bellare, Impagliazzo and Naor (FOCS '97), and that of single-prover systems by Kitaev and Watrous (STOC '00). Combining this monotonicity with our quantum game-channel correspondence, we show that entanglement-assisted zero-error classical and quantum capacities cannot be superactivated.
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BibTeX
@misc{bhattacharyya2026quantum,
title = {{Quantum interaction can superactivate cheating under parallel repetition}},
author = {Archishna Bhattacharyya and Laura Mančinska and Yuming Zhao},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.31223},
eprint = {2609.31223},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31223},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Quantum interaction can superactivate cheating under parallel repetition
AU - Archishna Bhattacharyya
AU - Laura Mančinska
AU - Yuming Zhao
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/25
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.31223
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31223
AB - We study interactive multiprover games and many-round protocols in which the communication between the verifier and the provers is quantum. Parallel repetition is known to suppress soundness error of classical two-prover games arbitrarily close to zero, as shown by Raz (STOC '95), even with quantum strategies as shown by Yuen (ICALP '16), and Bavarian, Vidick and Yuen (STOC '17). Yet, we show that quantum communication can have the opposite, unexpected effect. Specifically, we exhibit a one-round quantum game and two-round QMIP protocols whose local (unentangled) value is strictly less than one for a single instance, yet equals one under n-fold parallel repetition for every n ≥ 2. The key is that parallel repetition not only imposes additional winning conditions but also supplies additional quantum resources as entanglement in the exchanged states can be exploited jointly across copies. Our multiround examples build on superactivation of zero-error capacities of quantum channels. To establish this connection, we introduce quantum games and interactive protocols which capture the one-shot zero-error classical and quantum capacities, both with and without entanglement assistance. Our constructions use quantum-state verification and a teleportation-based reduction from two rounds to one. In contrast, when shared entanglement is allowed, we show that parallel repetition cannot increase the entangled value when at most $3$ messages are exchanged, consistent with classical results of Bellare, Impagliazzo and Naor (FOCS '97), and that of single-prover systems by Kitaev and Watrous (STOC '00). Combining this monotonicity with our quantum game-channel correspondence, we show that entanglement-assisted zero-error classical and quantum capacities cannot be superactivated.
ER -