Marginal-constrained entropy accumulation theorem (2502.02563v3)

Abstract: We derive a novel chain rule for a family of channel conditional entropies, covering von Neumann and sandwiched R\'{e}nyi entropies. In the process, we show that these channel conditional entropies are equal to their regularized version, and more generally, additive across tensor products of channels. For the purposes of cryptography, applying our chain rule to sequences of channels yields a new variant of R\'{e}nyi entropy accumulation, in which we can impose some specific forms of marginal-state constraint on the input states to each individual channel. This generalizes a recently introduced security proof technique that was developed to analyze prepare-and-measure QKD with no limitations on the repetition rate. In particular, our generalization yields ``fully adaptive'' protocols that can in principle update the entropy estimation procedure during the protocol itself, similar to the quantum probability estimation framework.