Breakthroughs of the Year 2025

Quantum Bayes’ Rule and Petz Transpose Map from the Minimum Change Principle

January 21, 2026

Bayes’ rule updates beliefs from new evidence and can be derived from a “minimum change” principle that alters prior beliefs only as much as necessary. Extending this idea to quantum states is challenging due to non-commutativity, and past proposals relied largely on formal analogies. This work derives a quantum Bayes’ rule directly from the minimum change principle, which often coincides with the Petz Transpose Map. However, when new evidence does not commute with expected evidence, it yields a previously unknown update map, indicating that quantum inference remains not fully understood.

Citation: Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 090203 (2025)

Authors: G. Bai, F. Buscemi, V. Scarani