Commercial adiabatic quantum annealers have the potential to solve important NP-hard optimization problems efficiently. The newest generation of those machines additionally allows the user to customize the anneal schedule, that is, the schedule with which the anneal fraction is changed from the start to the end of the annealing. In this work we use the aforementioned feature of the D-Wave 2000Q to attempt to monitor how the anneal solution evolves during the anneal process. This process we call slicing: at each time slice during the anneal, we are able to obtain an approximate distribution of anneal solutions. We use our technique to obtain a variety of insights into the D-Wave 2000Q. For example, we observe when individual bits flip during the anneal process and when they stabilize, which allows us to determine the freeze-out point for each qubit individually. We highlight our results using both random QUBO (quadratic unconstrained binary optimization) instances and, for better visualization, instances which we specifically optimize (using our own genetic algorithm) to exhibit a pronounced evolution of its solution during the anneal.
Quantum(-inspired) annealers show promise in solving combinatorial optimisation problems in practice. There has been extensive researches demonstrating the utility of D-Wave quantum annealer and quantum-inspired annealer, i.e., Fujitsu Digital Annealer on various applications, but few works are comparing these platforms. In this paper, we benchmark quantum(-inspired) annealers with three combinatorial optimisation problems ranging from generic scientific problems to complex problems in practical use. In the case where the problem size goes beyond the capacity of a quantum(-inspired) computer, …
We demonstrate that a quantum annealer can be used to solve the NP-complete problem of graph partitioning into subgraphs containing Hamiltonian cycles of constrained length. We present a method to find a partition of a given directed graph into Hamiltonian subgraphs with three or more vertices, called vertex 3-cycle cover. We formulate the problem as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimisation and run it on a D-Wave Advantage quantum annealer. We test our method on synthetic graphs constructed by adding a number of random edges to a set of disjoint cycles. We show that the probability of sol…
In an effort to overcome the limitations of random spin-glass benchmarks for quantum annealers, focus has shifted to carefully-crafted gadget-based problems whose logical structure has typically a planar topology. Recent experiments on these gadget problems using a commercially-available quantum annealer have demonstrated an impressive performance over a selection of commonly-used classical optimization heuristics. Here we show that efficient classical optimization techniques, such as minimum-weight perfect matching, can solve these gadget problems exactly and in polynomial time. We present ap…
We present \emph{multi-qubit correction} (MQC) as a novel postprocessing method for quantum annealers that views the evolution in an open-system as a Gibbs sampler and reduces a set of excited states to a new synthetic state with lower energy value. After sampling from the ground state of a given (Ising) Hamiltonian, MQC compares pairs of excited states to recognize virtual tunnels--i.e., a group of qubits that changing their states simultaneously can result in a new state with lower energy value--and successively converges to the ground state. Experimental results using D-Wave 2000Q quantum a…
We consider the minimum vertex cover problem having applications in e.g. biochemistry and network security. Quantum annealers can find the optimum solution of such NP-hard problems, given they can be embedded on the hardware. This is often infeasible due to limitations of the hardware connectivity structure. This paper presents a decomposition algorithm for the minimum vertex cover problem: The algorithm recursively divides an arbitrary problem until the generated subproblems can be embedded and solved on the annealer. To speed up the decomposition, we propose several pruning and reduction tec…
The solution of physical problems discretized using the finite element methods using quantum computers remains relatively unexplored. Here, we present a unified formulation (FEqa) to solve such problems using quantum annealers. FEqa is a hybrid technique in which the finite element problem is formulated on a classical computer, and the residual is minimized using a quantum annealer. The advantages of FEqa include utilizing a single qubit per degree of freedom, enforcing Dirichlet boundary conditions a priori, reaching arbitrary solution precision, and eliminating the possibility of the anneale…
Quantum particle statistics fundamentally controls the way particles interact, and plays an essential role in determining the properties of the system at low temperature. Here we study how the quantum statistics affects the computational power of quantum annealing. We propose an annealing Hamiltonian describing quantum particles moving on a square lattice and compare the computational performance of the atomic quantum annealers between two statistically-different components: spinless fermions and hard-core bosons. In addition, we take an Ising quantum annealer driven by traditional transverse-…
Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University（东北大学信息科学研究科）；Institute for Innovative Research, Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学创新研究所）；Sigma-i Co., Ltd.（Sigma-i 有限公司）
Quantum annealing was originally proposed as an approach for solving combinatorial optimisation problems using quantum effects. D-Wave Systems has released a production model of quantum annealing hardware. However, the inherent noise and various environmental factors in the hardware hamper the determination of optimal solutions. In addition, the freezing effect in regions with weak quantum fluctuations generates outputs approximately following a Gibbs--Boltzmann distribution at an extremely low temperature. Thus, a quantum annealer may also serve as a fast sampler for the Ising spin-glass prob…
Recent advancements in quantum annealing hardware and numerous studies in this area suggests that quantum annealers have the potential to be effective in solving unconstrained binary quadratic programming problems. Naturally, one may desire to expand the application domain of these machines to problems with general discrete variables. In this paper, we explore the possibility of employing quantum annealers to solve unconstrained quadratic programming problems over a bounded integer domain. We present an approach for encoding integer variables into binary ones, thereby representing unconstraine…
We are at the verge of a new era, which will be dominated by Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Devices. Prototypical examples for these new technologies are present-day quantum annealers. In the present work, we investigate to what extent static disorder generated by an external source of noise does not have to be detrimental, but can actually assist quantum annealers in achieving better performance. In particular, we analyze the graph coloring problem that can be solved on a sparse topology (i.e. chimera graph) via suitable embedding. We show that specifically tailored disorder can enhance the…
Conventional quantum annealing does not sample all ground states fairly. We demonstrate that fair sampling can be achieved by performing simulated annealing on a quantum annealer. We discuss the problems that occur when implementing this method and propose an alternative way to overcome them. We numerically verify the fair sampling ability of our method in a small-scale toy model.
Quantum annealing is an emerging technology with the potential to solve some of the computational challenges that remain unresolved as we approach an era beyond Moore's Law. In this work, we investigate the capabilities of the quantum annealers of D-Wave Systems, Inc., for computing a certain type of Boolean tensor decomposition called Boolean Hierarchical Tucker Network (BHTN). Boolean tensor decomposition problems ask for finding a decomposition of a high-dimensional tensor with categorical, [true, false], values, as a product of smaller Boolean core tensors. As the BHTN decompositions are u…
The ability to evaluate the outcomes of quantum annealers is essential for such devices to be used in complex computational tasks. We introduce a statistical test of the quality of Ising-based annealers' output based on the data only, assessing the ground state's probability of being sampled. A higher probability value implies that at least the lower part of the spectrum is a part of the sample. Assuming a plausible model of the univariate energy distribution of the sample, we express the ground-state energy and temperature as a function of cumulants up to the third order. Using the annealer s…
Physical annealing systems provide heuristic approaches to solving NP-hard Ising optimization problems. Here, we study the performance of two types of annealing machines--a commercially available quantum annealer built by D-Wave Systems, and measurement-feedback coherent Ising machines (CIMs) based on optical parametric oscillator networks--on two classes of problems, the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model and MAX-CUT. The D-Wave quantum annealer outperforms the CIMs on MAX-CUT on regular graphs of degree 3. On denser problems, however, we observe an exponential penalty for the quantum anneale…
The D-Wave quantum annealer has emerged as a novel computational architecture that is attracting significant interest, but there have been only a few practical algorithms exploiting the power of quantum annealers. Here we present a model predictive control (MPC) algorithm using a quantum annealer for a system allowing a finite number of input values. Such an MPC problem is classified as a non-deterministic polynomial-time-hard combinatorial problem, and thus real-time sequential optimization is difficult to obtain with conventional computational systems. We circumvent this difficulty by conver…
Recent tests performed on the D-Wave Two quantum annealer have revealed no clear evidence of speedup over conventional silicon-based technologies. Here, we present results from classical parallel-tempering Monte Carlo simulations combined with isoenergetic cluster moves of the archetypal benchmark problem-an Ising spin glass-on the native chip topology. Using realistic uncorrelated noise models for the D-Wave Two quantum annealer, we study the best-case resilience, i.e., the probability that the ground-state configuration is not affected by random fields and random-bond fluctuations found on t…
Quantum annealers are special-purpose quantum computers that primarily target solving Ising optimization problems. Theoretical work has predicted that the probability of a quantum annealer ending in a ground state can be dramatically improved if the spin driving terms, which play a crucial role in the functioning of a quantum annealer, have different strengths for different spins; that is, they are inhomogeneous. In this paper we describe a time-shift-based protocol for inhomogeneous driving and demonstrate, using an experimental quantum annealer, the performance of our protocol on a range of …
Quantum annealing devices have been subject to various analyses in order to classify their usefulness for practical applications. While it has been successfully proven that such systems can in general be used for solving combinatorial optimization problems, they have not been used to solve chemistry applications. In this paper we apply a mapping, put forward by Xia et al. (The Journal of Physical Chemistry B 122.13 (2017): 3384-3395.), from a quantum chemistry Hamiltonian to an Ising spin glass formulation and find the ground state energy with a quantum annealer. Additionally we investigate th…
NP-hard problems such as the maximum clique or minimum vertex cover problems, two of Karp's 21 NP-hard problems, have several applications in computational chemistry, biochemistry and computer network security. Adiabatic quantum annealers can search for the optimum value of such NP-hard optimization problems, given the problem can be embedded on their hardware. However, this is often not possible due to certain limitations of the hardware connectivity structure of the annealer. This paper studies a general framework for a decomposition algorithm for NP-hard graph problems aiming to identify an…
Quantum computers are ideal for solving chemistry problems due to their polynomial scaling with system size in contrast to classical computers which scale exponentially. Until now molecular energy calculations using quantum computing hardware have been limited to quantum simulators. In this paper, a new methodology is presented to calculate the vibrational spectrum of a molecule on a quantum annealer. The key idea of the method is a mapping of the ground state variational problem onto an Ising or quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem by expressing the expansion coefficient…
Nested quantum annealing correction (NQAC) is an error correcting scheme for quantum annealing that allows for the encoding of a logical qubit into an arbitrarily large number of physical qubits. The encoding replaces each logical qubit by a complete graph of degree $C$. The nesting level $C$ represents the distance of the error-correcting code and controls the amount of protection against thermal and control errors. Theoretical mean-field analyses and empirical data obtained with a D-Wave Two quantum annealer (supporting up to $512$ qubits) showed that NQAC has the potential to achieve a scal…
Attention-Like Hebbian Learning from Quantum Probability Flow and Quantum-Annealer Tests
Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University（东北大学信息科学研究生院）；Department of Physics, Institute of Science Tokyo（东京科学大学物理系）；Research and Education Institute for Semiconductors and Informatics, Kumamoto University（熊本大学半导体与信息学研究与教育学院）；Sigma-i Co., Ltd.（Sigma-i有限公司）
We report on a case study in programming an early quantum annealer to attack optimization problems related to operational planning. While a number of studies have looked at the performance of quantum annealers on problems native to their architecture, and others have examined performance of select problems stemming from an application area, ours is one of the first studies of a quantum annealer's performance on parametrized families of hard problems from a practical domain. We explore two different general mappings of planning problems to quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) prob…
Beyond Optimization: Harnessing Quantum Annealer Dynamics for Machine Learning
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University（冲绳科学技术大学院大学）；Toyota Central R&D Labs., Inc.（丰田中央研究所）；DENSO CORPORATION（电装株式会社）；Global Research and Development Center for Business by Quantum-AI technology (G-QuAT), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)（产业技术综合研究所量子AI技术商业化全球研发中心）
We propose a novel method for reducing the number of variables in quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problems, using a quantum annealer (or any sampler) to fix the value of a large portion of the variables to values that have a high probability of being optimal. The resulting problems are usually much easier for the quantum annealer to solve, due to their being smaller and consisting of disconnected components. This approach significantly increases the success rate and number of observations of the best known energy value in samples obtained from the quantum annealer, when compared wi…
We demonstrate that the output statistics of a quantum annealing protocol run on D-Wave 2000Q can be explained by static disorder garnishing an otherwise ideal device hardware. A Boltzmann-like distribution over distinct output states emerges with increasing problem size, and significantly reduces the chances for a correct identification of the sought-after optimal solutions.
By contrasting the performance of two quantum annealers operating at different temperatures, we address recent questions related to the role of temperature in these devices and their function as `Boltzmann samplers'. Using a method to reliably calculate the degeneracies of the energy levels of large-scale spin-glass instances, we are able to estimate the instance-dependent effective temperature from the output of annealing runs. Our results show that the output distributions of the annealers do not in general correspond to classical Boltzmann distributions. For the small fraction of the instan…
We demonstrate experimentally the ability of a quantum annealer to distinguish between sets of non-isomorphic graphs that share the same classical Ising spectrum. Utilizing the pause-and-quench features recently introduced into D-Wave quantum annealing processors, which allow the user to probe the quantum Hamiltonian realized in the middle of an anneal, we show that obtaining thermal averages of diagonal observables of classically indistinguishable non-isomorphic graphs encoded into transverse-field Ising Hamiltonians enable their discrimination. We discuss the significance of our results in t…
Recent advances in quantum technology have led to the development and manufacturing of experimental programmable quantum annealing optimizers that contain hundreds of quantum bits. These optimizers, named `D-Wave' chips, promise to solve practical optimization problems potentially faster than conventional `classical' computers. Attempts to quantify the quantum nature of these chips have been met with both excitement and skepticism but have also brought up numerous fundamental questions pertaining to the distinguishability of quantum annealers from their classical thermal counterparts. Here, we…
Quantum computing is developing fast. Real world applications are within reach in the coming years. One of the most promising areas is combinatorial optimisation, where the Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimisation (QUBO) problem formulation is used to get good approximate solutions. Both the universal quantum computer as the quantum annealer can handle this kind of problems well. In this paper, we present an application on multimodal container planning. We show how to map this problem to a QUBO problem formulation and how the practical implementation can be done on the quantum annealer prod…
Russian Quantum Center（俄罗斯量子中心）；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；P. N. Lebedev Physics Institute（P. N. 列别杰夫物理研究所）
Quantum simulators and processors are rapidly improving nowadays, but they are still not able to solve complex and multidimensional tasks of practical value. However, certain numerical algorithms inspired by the physics of real quantum devices prove to be efficient in application to specific problems, related, for example, to combinatorial optimization. Here we implement a numerical annealer based on simulating the coherent Ising machine as a tool to sample from a high-dimensional Boltzmann probability distribution with the energy functional defined by the classical Ising Hamiltonian. Samples …
Adiabatic quantum computing is an analog quantum computing scheme with various applications in solving optimization problems. In the parity picture of quantum optimization, the problem is encoded in local fields that act on qubits which are connected via local 4-body terms. We present an implementation of a parity annealer with Transmon qubits with a specifically tailored Ising interaction from Josephson ring modulators.
We develop and apply several strategies for setting physical parameters on quantum annealers for application problems that do not fit natively on the hardware graph. The strategies are tested with a culled random set of mixed satisfiability problems, yielding results that generalize to guidelines regarding which parameter setting strategies to use for different classes of problems, and how to choose other necessary hardware quantities as well. Alternate methods of changing the hardware implementation of an application problem are also considered and their utility discussed.
We argue that a quantum annealer at very long annealing times is likely to experience a quasistatic evolution, returning a final population that is close to a Boltzmann distribution of the Hamiltonian at a single (freeze-out) point during the annealing. Such a system is expected to correlate well with a proper quantum Monte Carlo simulation. It may also correlate with simulated annealing if at the freeze-out point the quantum energy eigenvalues are close to the classical ones. These correlations are just signatures of equilibration and do not mean that the evolution of the quantum annealer is …
A successful application of quantum annealing to machine learning is training restricted Boltzmann machines (RBM). However, many neural networks for vision applications are feedforward structures, such as multilayer perceptrons (MLP). Backpropagation is currently the most effective technique to train MLPs for supervised learning. This paper aims to be forward-looking by exploring the training of MLPs using quantum annealers. We exploit an equivalence between MLPs and energy-based models (EBM), which are a variation of RBMs with a maximum conditional likelihood objective. This leads to a strate…
We propose a new method for solving binary optimization problems under inequality constraints using a quantum annealer. To deal with inequality constraints, we often use slack variables, as in previous approaches. When we use slack variables, we usually conduct a binary expansion, which requires numerous physical qubits. Therefore, the problem of the current quantum annealer is limited to a small scale. In this study, we employ the alternating direction method of multipliers. This approach allows us to deal with various types using constraints in the current quantum annealer without slack vari…
A recent paper [arXiv:1805.05217] compares performance of a D-Wave 2000Q system to two versions of the coherent Ising machine (CIM). This comment points out some flaws in the analysis, which undermine several of the conclusions drawn in the paper.
Near term quantum hardware promises unprecedented computational advantage. Crucial in its development is the characterization and minimization of computational errors. We propose the use of the quantum fluctuation theorem to benchmark the performance of quantum annealers. This versatile tool provides simple means to determine whether the quantum dynamics are unital, unitary, and adiabatic, or whether the system is prone to thermal noise. Our proposal is experimentally tested on two generations of the D-Wave machine, which illustrates the sensitivity of the fluctuation theorem to the smallest a…
Recent years have witnessed an unprecedented increase in experiments and hybrid simulations involving quantum computers. In particular, quantum annealers. Although quantum supremacy has not been established thus far, there exist a plethora of algorithms promising to outperform classical computers in the near-term future. Here, we propose a parallel in time approach to simulate dynamical systems designed to be executed already on present-day quantum annealers. In essence, purely classical methods for solving dynamics systems are serial. Therefore, their parallelization is substantially limited.…
Commercial quantum annealers from D-Wave Systems can find high quality solutions of quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problems that can be embedded onto its hardware. However, even though such devices currently offer up to 2048 qubits, due to limitations on the connectivity of those qubits, the size of problems that can typically be solved is rather small (around 65 variables). This limitation poses a problem for using D-Wave machines to solve application-relevant problems, which can have thousands of variables. For the important Maximum Clique problem, this article investigates meth…
We propose a new kernel that quantifies success for the task of computing a core-periphery partition for an undirected network. Finding the associated optimal partitioning may be expressed in the form of a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem, to which a state-of-the-art quantum annealer may be applied. We therefore make use of the new objective function to (a) judge the performance of a quantum annealer, and (b) compare this approach with existing heuristic core-periphery partitioning methods. The quantum annealing is performed on the commercially available D-Wave machin…
In this paper an application of D-Wave Systems quantum annealer for optimizing initial line-up of a soccer team is presented. Players and their playing position are selected to maximize the sum of players ratings for both a 4-3-3 attack formation and a 4-2-3-1 medium defensive formation. The problem is stated as a binary quadratic model (BQM) and it is solved in a D-Wave Leap Hybrid Solver. Results are presented and compared with already published results obtained with a classical solver.
Quantum chemistry calculations for small molecules on quantum hardware have been demonstrated to date only on universal-gate quantum computers, not quantum annealers. The latter devices are limited to finding the lowest eigenstate of the Ising Hamiltonian whereas the electronic Hamiltonian could not be mapped to the Ising form without exponential growth of the Ising Hamiltonian with the size of the system [J. Phys. Chem. B 122, 3384 (2018)]. Here we propose a novel mixed discrete-continuous optimization algorithm, which finds the lowest eigenstate of the qubit coupled cluster (QCC) method usin…
Boltzmann sampling with quantum annealers via fast Stein correction
Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo（东京大学前沿科学研究生院）；Center for Basic Research on Materials, National Institute for Materials Science（物质材料研究机构基础材料研究中心）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）
The application in cryptography of quantum algorithms for prime factorization fostered the interest in quantum computing. However, quantum computers, and particularly quantum annealers, can also be helpful to construct secure cryptographic keys. Indeed, finding robust Boolean functions for cryptography is an important problem in sequence ciphers, block ciphers, and hash functions, among others. Due to the super-exponential size $\mathcal{O}(2^{2^n})$ of the associated space, finding $n$-variable Boolean functions with global cryptographic constraints is computationally hard. This problem has a…
The recent availability of quantum annealers has fueled a new area of information technology where such devices are applied to address practically motivated and computationally difficult problems with hardware that exploits quantum mechanical phenomena. D-Wave annealers are promising platforms to solve these problems in the form of quadratic unconstrained binary optimization. Here we provide a formulation of the Chinese postman problem that can be used as a tool for probing the local connectivity of graphs and networks. We treat the problem classically with a tabu algorithm and using a D-Wave …
We present a general method, called Qade, for solving differential equations using a quantum annealer. The solution is obtained as a linear combination of a set of basis functions. On current devices, Qade can solve systems of coupled partial differential equations that depend linearly on the solution and its derivatives, with non-linear variable coefficients and arbitrary inhomogeneous terms. We test the method with several examples and find that state-of-the-art quantum annealers can find the solution accurately for problems requiring a small enough function basis. We provide a Python packag…
Quantum annealers (QAs) are specialized quantum computers that minimize objective functions over discrete variables by physically exploiting quantum effects. Current QA platforms allow for the optimization of quadratic objectives defined over binary variables (qubits), also known as Ising problems. In the last decade, QA systems as implemented by D-Wave have scaled with Moore-like growth. Current architectures provide 2048 sparsely-connected qubits, and continued exponential growth is anticipated, together with increased connectivity. We explore the feasibility of such architectures for solvin…
