Recently Xue et al. [arXiv:1909.02196] demonstrated numerically that QAOA performance varies as a power law in the amount of noise under certain physical noise models. In this short note, we provide a deeper analysis of the origin of this behavior. In particular, we provide an approximate closed form equation for the fidelity and cost in terms of the noise rate, system size, and circuit depth. As an application, we show these equations accurately model the trade off between larger circuits which attain better cost values, at the expense of greater degradation due to noise.
The quantum approximate optimization algorithm~(QAOA) first proposed by Farhi et al. promises near-term applications based on its simplicity, universality, and provable optimality. A depth-p QAOA consists of p interleaved unitary transformations induced by two mutually non-commuting Hamiltonians. A long-standing question concerning the performance of QAOA is the dependence of its success probability as a function of circuit depth p. We make initial progress by analyzing the success probability of QAOA for realizing state transfer in a one-dimensional qubit chain using two-qubit XY Hamiltonians…
Hardware errors are a major obstacle to demonstrating quantum advantage with the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). Recently, symmetry verification has been proposed and empirically demonstrated to boost the quantum state fidelity, the expected solution quality, and the success probability of QAOA on a superconducting quantum processor. Symmetry verification uses parity checks that leverage the symmetries of the objective function to be optimized. We develop a theoretical framework for analyzing this approach under local noise and derive explicit formulas for fidelity improveme…
The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), which is a variational quantum algorithm, aims to give sub-optimal solutions of combinatorial optimization problems. It is widely believed that QAOA has the potential to demonstrate application-level quantum advantages in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum(NISQ) processors with shallow circuit depth. Since the core of QAOA is the computation of expectation values of the problem Hamiltonian, an important practical question is whether we can find an efficient classical algorithm to solve quantum mean value in the case of general shallow qu…
Quantum Approximation Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a highly advocated variational algorithm for solving the combinatorial optimization problem. One critical feature in the quantum circuit of QAOA algorithm is that it consists of two-qubit operators that commute. The flexibility in reordering the two-qubit gates allows compiler optimizations to generate circuits with better depths, gate count, and fidelity. However, it also imposes significant challenges due to additional freedom exposed in the compilation. Prior studies lack the following: (1) Performance guarantee, (2) Scalability, and (3…
We present a thorough investigation of problems that can be solved exactly with the level-1 Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). To this end we implicitly define a class of problem Hamiltonians that employed as phase separator in a level-1 QAOA circuit provide unit overlap with a target subspace spanned by a set of computational basis states. For one-dimensional target subspaces we identify instances within the implicitly defined class of Hamiltonians for which Quantum Annealing (QA) and Simulated Annealing (SA) have an exponentially small probability to find the solution. Conseq…
The fermionic SWAP network is a qubit routing sequence that can be used to efficiently execute the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). Even with a minimally-connected topology on an n-qubit processor, this routing sequence enables O(n^2) operations to execute in O(n) steps. In this work, we optimize the execution of fermionic SWAP networks for QAOA through two techniques. First, we take advantage of an overcomplete set of native hardware operations [including 150 ns controlled-pi/2 phase gates with up to 99.67(1)% fidelity] in order to decompose the relevant quantum gates and SW…
We develop a global variable substitution method that reduces $n$-variable monomials in combinatorial optimization problems to equivalent instances with monomials in fewer variables. We apply this technique to $3$-SAT and analyze the optimal quantum circuit depth needed to solve the reduced problem using the quantum approximate optimization algorithm. For benchmark $3$-SAT problems, we find that the upper bound of the circuit depth is smaller when the problem is formulated as a product and uses the substitution method to decompose gates than when the problem is written in the linear formulatio…
Quantum-Circuit Framework for Two-Stage Stochastic Programming via QAOA Integrated with a Quantum Generative Neural Network
Engineering Department of the University of Electro-Communications（电气通信大学工学部）；Grid Inc.（Grid公司）；i-PERC, The University of Electro-Communications（电气通信大学i-PERC）
Optimizing QAOA circuit transpilation with parity twine and SWAP network encodings
Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Institute for Advanced Simulation, Forschungszentrum Jülich（于利希研究中心先进模拟研究所超级计算中心）；Institute for Quantum Computing Analytics (PGI-12), Forschungszentrum Jülich（于利希研究中心量子计算分析研究所）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学机械工程系）；Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University（普渡大学戴维森化学工程学院）；AIDAS；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）
Designing noisy-resilience quantum algorithms is indispensable for practical applications on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum~(NISQ) devices. Here we propose a quantum approximate optimization algorithm~(QAOA) with a very shallow circuit, called loop-QAOA, to avoid issues of noises at intermediate depths, while still can be able to exploit the power of quantum computing. The key point is to use outputs of shallow-circuit QAOA as a bias to update the problem Hamiltonian that encodes the solution as the ground state. By iterating a loop between updating the problem Hamiltonian and optimizing the…
The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) generates an approximate solution to combinatorial optimization problems using a variational ansatz circuit defined by parameterized layers of quantum evolution. In theory, the approximation improves with increasing ansatz depth but gate noise and circuit complexity undermine performance in practice. Here, we introduce a multi-angle ansatz for QAOA that reduces circuit depth and improves the approximation ratio by increasing the number of classical parameters. Even though the number of parameters increases, our results indicate that good pa…
The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a quantum-classical hybrid algorithm intending to find the ground state of a target Hamiltonian. Theoretically, QAOA can obtain the approximate solution if the quantum circuit is deep enough. Actually, the performance of QAOA decreases practically if the quantum circuit is deep since near-term devices are not noise-free and the errors caused by noise accumulate as the quantum circuit increases. In order to reduce the depth of quantum circuits, we propose a new ansatz dubbed as "Shortcuts to QAOA" (S-QAOA), S-QAOA provides shortcuts to th…
Scaling QAOA: transferring optimal adiabatic schedules from small-scale to large-scale variational circuits
Aix-Marseille Université, Université de Toulon（艾克斯-马赛大学、土伦大学）；ENSTA, Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院）；Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers（国立工艺博物馆）；Université Paris Cité（巴黎西岱大学）
The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a promising approach for programming a near-term gate-based hybrid quantum computer to find good approximate solutions of hard combinatorial problems. However, little is currently know about the capabilities of QAOA, or of the difficulty of the requisite parameters optimization. Here, we study the performance of QAOA on the MaxCut combinatorial optimization problem, optimizing the quantum circuits on a classical computer using automatic differentiation and stochastic gradient descent, using QuantumFlow, a quantum circuit simulator implem…
QAOA-GPT: Efficient Generation of Adaptive and Regular Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm Circuits
Department of Computer and Information Sciences University of Delaware（计算机与信息科学系德克萨斯大学）；NVIDIA Corporation（英伟达公司）；Department of Chemistry Department of Physics Center for Quantum Information Science and Engineering（化学系物理系量子信息科学与工程中心）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工学院）
Mechanism of Efficacy in QAOA for Random k-SAT: From Adiabatic Manifold to Sublinear Parameter Optimization
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Key Laboratory of Computer Network and Information Integration (Southeast University), Ministry of Education（教育部计算机网络与信息集成重点实验室（东南大学））
In this work, we present a new large-scale quantum circuit simulator. It is based on the tensor network contraction technique to represent quantum circuits. We propose a novel parallelization algorithm based on \stepslice . In this paper, we push the requirement on the size of a quantum computer that will be needed to demonstrate the advantage of quantum computation with Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). We computed 210 qubit QAOA circuits with 1,785 gates on 1,024 nodes of the the Cray XC 40 supercomputer Theta. To the best of our knowledge, this constitutes the largest QAOA …
The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is an approach for near-term quantum computers to potentially demonstrate computational advantage in solving combinatorial optimization problems. However, the viability of the QAOA depends on how its performance and resource requirements scale with problem size and complexity for realistic hardware implementations. Here, we quantify scaling of the expected resource requirements by synthesizing optimized circuits for hardware architectures with varying levels of connectivity. Assuming noisy gate operations, we estimate the number of measurem…
The parity transformation encodes spin models in the low-energy subspace of a larger Hilbert-space with constraints on a planar lattice. Applying the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), the constraints can either be enforced explicitly, by energy penalties, or implicitly, by restricting the dynamics to the low-energy subspace via the driver Hamiltonian. While the explicit approach allows for parallelization with a system-size-independent circuit depth, the implicit approach shows better QAOA performance. Here we combine the two approaches in order to improve the QAOA performance…
Hybrid quantum-classical algorithms, such as variational quantum algorithms (VQA), are suitable for implementation on NISQ computers. In this Letter we expand an implicit step of VQAs: the classical pre-computation subroutine which can non-trivially use classical algorithms to simplify, transform, or specify problem instance-specific variational quantum circuits. In VQA there is a trade-off between quality of solution and difficulty of circuit construction and optimization. In one extreme, we find VQA for MAXCUT which are exact, but circuit design or variational optimization is NP-HARD. At the…
The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) has become a cornerstone of contemporary quantum applications development. In QAOA, a quantum circuit is trained -- by repeatedly adjusting circuit parameters -- to solve a problem. Several recent findings have reported parameter concentration effects in QAOA and their presence has become one of folklore: while empirically observed, the concentrations have not been defined and analytical approaches remain scarce, focusing on limiting system and not considering parameter scaling as system size increases. We found that optimal QAOA circuit pa…
In this work we present two techniques that tremendously increase the performance of tensor-network based quantum circuit simulations. The techniques are implemented in the QTensor package and benchmarked using Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) circuits. The techniques allowed us to increase the depth and size of QAOA circuits that can be simulated. In particular, we increased the QAOA depth from 2 to 5 and the size of a QAOA circuit from 180 to 244 qubits. Moreover, we increased the speed of simulations by up to 10 million times. Our work provides important insights into how v…
We develop a framework for analyzing layered quantum algorithms such as quantum alternating operator ansätze. Our framework relates quantum cost gradient operators, derived from the cost and mixing Hamiltonians, to classical cost difference functions that reflect cost function neighborhood structure. By considering QAOA circuits from the Heisenberg picture, we derive exact general expressions for expectation values as series expansions in the algorithm parameters, cost gradient operators, and cost difference functions. This enables novel interpretability and insight into QAOA behavior in vario…
While a Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is intended to provide a quantum advantage in finding approximate solutions to combinatorial optimization problems, noise in the system is a hurdle in exploiting its full potential. Several error mitigation techniques have been studied to lessen the effect of noise on this algorithm. Recently, Majumdar et al. proposed a Depth First Search (DFS) based method to reduce $n-1$ CNOT gates in the ansatz design of QAOA for finding Max-Cut in a graph G = (V, E), |V| = n. However, this method tends to increase the depth of the circuit, making it…
