Hierarchy of discriminative power and complexity in learning quantum ensembles
arXiv:2601.22005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distance metrics are central to machine learning, yet distances between ensembles of quantum states remain poorly understood due to fundamental quantum measurement constraints. We introduce a hierarchy of integral probability metrics, termed MMD-$k$, which generalizes the maximum mean discrepancy to quantum ensembles and exhibit a strict trade-off between discriminative power and statistical efficiency as the moment order $k$ increases. For pure-state ensembles of size $N$, estimating MMD-$k$ using experimentally feasible SWAP-test-based estimators requires […]