Decoupling by local random unitaries without simultaneous smoothing, and applications to multi-user quantum information tasks

We show that a simple telescoping sum trick, together with the triangle inequality and a tensorisation property of expected-contractive coefficients of random channels, allow us to achieve general simultaneous decoupling for multiple users via local actions. Employing both old [Dupuis et al. Commun. Math. Phys. 328:251-284 (2014)] and new methods [Dupuis, arXiv:2105.05342], we obtain bounds on the expected deviation from ideal decoupling either in the one-shot setting in terms of smooth min-entropies, or the finite block length setting in terms of R\'enyi entropies. These bounds are essentially optimal without the need to address the simultaneous smoothing conjecture, which remains unresolved. This leads to one-shot, finite block length, and asymptotic achievability results for several tasks in quantum Shannon theory, including local randomness extraction of multiple parties, multi-party assisted entanglement concentration, multi-party quantum state merging, and quantum coding for the quantum multiple access channel. Because of the one-shot nature of our protocols, we obtain achievability results without the need for time-sharing, which at the same time leads to easy proofs of the asymptotic coding theorems. We show that our one-shot decoupling bounds furthermore yield achievable rates (so far only conjectured) for all four tasks in compound settings, that is for only partially known i.i.d. source or channel, which are furthermore optimal for entanglement of assistance and state merging.