Quantum soft covering with relative entropy criterion

In this work, we propose a soft covering problem for fully quantum channels using relative entropy as a criterion for operator closeness. We establish covering lemmas by deriving one-shot bounds on the achievable rates in terms of smooth min-entropies. In the asymptotic regime, we show that the infimum of the rate, defined as the logarithm of the minimum rank of the encoded input state, is given by the minimal coherent information between the reference and output systems that yields the target output state. Furthermore, we present a one-shot quantum decoupling theorem that also employs a relative-entropy criterion. Due to the Pinsker inequality, our one-shot results based on the relative-entropy criterion are tighter than the corresponding results based on the trace norm considered in the literature. In addition, we establish achievable error exponents and second-order rates for quantum soft covering under both trace-distance and relative-entropy criteria.