Agnostic Product Mixed State Tomography via Robust Statistics

We study the complexity of two closely related learning problems, one quantum and one classical. In the quantum setting, we consider agnostic tomography for the natural class of product mixed states. Given $N$ copies of an $n$-qubit state $\rho$, the goal is to output a nearly optimal product mixed state approximation in trace distance. While recent work has focused on pure-state ansatz (e.g., product or stabilizer states), no polynomial-time guarantees were previously known for mixed-state ansatz. In the classical setting, we study robust learning of binary product distributions: given samples from an unknown distribution on ${0,1}^n$, the goal is to output a nearly optimal product approximation. Our main contributions are as follows. (1) We give a semi-agnostic tomography algorithm for product mixed states with polynomial sample and computational complexity achieving error $O(\mathrm{opt}\log(1/\mathrm{opt}))$, where $\mathrm{opt}$ is the trace distance to the best product approximation. This is the first efficient algorithm with any nontrivial agnostic guarantee for mixed-state ansatz, using only single-qubit, single-copy measurements. We also prove a Quantum Statistical Query lower bound showing near-optimality, and an unconditional lower bound demonstrating that adaptivity is necessary under single-qubit measurements. (2) We give a semi-agnostic algorithm for robustly learning binary product distributions with matching guarantees and establish a Statistical Query lower bound, essentially resolving the efficient robust learnability of this class and improving on prior work since Diakonikolas et al. (2016).