On the epistemic view of quantum states
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We investigate the strengths and limitations of the Spekkens toy model, which is a local hidden variable model that replicates many important properties of quantum dynamics. First, we present a set of five axioms that fully encapsulate Spekkens’ toy model. We then test whether these axioms can be extended to capture more quantum phenomena by allowing operations on epistemic as well as ontic states. We discover that the resulting group of operations is isomorphic to the projective extended Clifford group for two qubits. This larger group of operations results in a physically unreasonable model; consequently, we claim that a relaxed definition of valid operations in Spekkens’ toy model cannot produce an equivalence with the Clifford group for two qubits. However, the new operations do serve as tests for correlation in a two toy bit model, analogous to the well known Horodecki criterion for the separability of quantum states.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".