Bayesian Matroid-Union Bounds for Quantum List Discrimination: Support Congestion, Process Compression, and Exact Adaptive-Parallel Phases
In quantum list discrimination a measurement returns at most ell candidate labels and succeeds when the true hypothesis belongs to the returned list. We associate a Rado independent-transversal matroid to the support subspaces of a mixed quantum ensemble and prove that every true-label inclusion vector lies in the independence polytope of the ell-fold matroid union. This yields all-subset Bayesian bounds for arbitrary priors, soft rewards, an integer congestion deficit, equality audits, and canonical compression to quantum-process testers. Exact attainment and insufficiency examples separate support combinatorics from quantum geometry. We then solve two input-dependent process families. For binary laminar dephase-prepare channels with M=2^h, list size ell=2^s, and q uses, arbitrary entangled parallel probes and adaptive quantum memories obey P_parallel=min(1,ell(q+1)/M) and P_adaptive=min(1,ell 2^q/M). For complete unitary-error ensembles we translate the known approximate dense-coding spectrum law into a list cap, derive an exact serial/parallel/Bell multitime trichotomy, and give a fixed-probe example where the coarse list-rank cap is not attained. The matroid theorem is a support obstruction rather than a general POVM feasibility characterization; the laminar separation is a classical feedback tradeoff embedded quantumly, and no indefinite-causal-order advantage is claimed.