Succinct Arguments for QMA from Collapsing Hash Functions

Abstract

We prove the existence of succinct arguments for QMA, assuming only the existence of collapsing hash functions. This is the first scheme that relies only on unstructured ``Minicrypt''assumptions, which are not known to imply public-key encryption. Our main technical contribution is a quantum-succinct \emph{claw-state generation} protocol that allows us to bootstrap a small number of quantum correlations into an arbitrarily large number of claw-state correlations, using classical communication only. This improves upon the work of [Zhang, STOC 2021], having better round complexity, a proof in the standard model, and being overall much simpler. This yields a quantum-succinct blind delegation of quantum computation protocol from one-way functions, which we plug into the communication-compression compiler of [Bartusek, Liu, and Malavolta, EUROCRYPT 2026] to obtain succinct arguments for QMA.