Quantum annealing (QA) and Quantum Alternating Operator Ansatz (QAOA) are both heuristic quantum algorithms intended for sampling optimal solutions of combinatorial optimization problems. In this article we implement a rigorous direct comparison between QA on D-Wave hardware and QAOA on IBMQ hardware. These two quantum algorithms are also compared against classical simulated annealing. The studied problems are instances of a class of Ising models, with variable assignments of $+1$ or $-1$, that contain cubic $ZZZ$ interactions (higher order terms) and match both the native connectivity of the Pegasus topology D-Wave chips and the heavy hexagonal lattice of the IBMQ chips. The novel QAOA implementation on the heavy hexagonal lattice has a CNOT depth of $6$ per round and allows for usage of an entire heavy hexagonal lattice. Experimentally, QAOA is executed on an ensemble of randomly generated Ising instances with a grid search over $1$ and $2$ round angles using all 127 programmable superconducting transmon qubits of ibm_washington. The error suppression technique digital dynamical decoupling is also tested on all QAOA circuits. QA is executed on the same Ising instances with the programmable superconducting flux qubit devices D-Wave Advantage_system4.1 and Advantage_system6.1 using modified annealing schedules with pauses. We find that QA outperforms QAOA on all problem instances. We also find that dynamical decoupling enables 2-round QAOA to marginally outperform 1-round QAOA, which is not the case without dynamical decoupling.
We present a comparison between the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) and two widely studied competing methods, Quantum Annealing (QA) and Simulated Annealing (SA). To achieve this, we define a class of optimization problems with respect to their spectral properties which are exactly solvable with QAOA. In this class, we identify instances for which QA and SA have an exponentially small probability to find the solution. Consequently, our results define a first demarcation line between QAOA, Simulated Annealing and Quantum Annealing, and highlight the fundamental differences bet…
The advent of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices offers crucial opportunities for the development of quantum algorithms. Here we evaluate the noise tolerance of two quantum neural network (QNN) architectures on IBM's NISQ devices, namely, dissipative QNN (DQNN) whose building-block perceptron is a completely positive map, and the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). We compare these two approaches to learning an unknown unitary. While both networks succeed in this learning task, we find that a DQNN learns an unknown unitary more reliably than QAOA and is less suscept…
Are quantum advantages in discrete manufacturing achievable in the near term? As manufacturing-relevant NISQ algorithms, we identified Quantum Annealing (QA) and the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) for combinatorial optimization as well as Derivative Quantum Circuits (DQC) for solving non-linear PDEs. While there is evidence for QAOA's outperformance, this requires post-NISQ circuit depths. In the case of QA, there is up to now no unquestionable evidence for advantage compared to classical computation. Yet different protocols could lead to finding such instances. Together wit…
Quantum Annealing (QA) and the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) are two special cases of the following control problem: apply a combination of two Hamiltonians to minimize the energy of a quantum state. Which is more effective has remained unclear. Here we analytically apply the framework of optimal control theory to show that generically, given a fixed amount of time, the optimal procedure has the pulsed (or "bang-bang") structure of QAOA at the beginning and end but can have a smooth annealing structure in between. This is in contrast to previous works which have suggested t…
Universal Resources for QAOA and Quantum Annealing
Instituto de Física Fundamental IFF-CSIC（基础物理研究所）；Instituto Tecnológico de Galicia（加利西亚理工学院）；Departamento de Física, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid（马德里卡洛斯三世大学物理系）
Quantum annealing inspired algorithms for the NISQ Era
Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Forschungszentrum Jülich（于利希超级计算中心，于利希研究中心）；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）；Modular Supercomputing and Quantum Computing, Goethe University Frankfurt（法兰克福歌德大学模块化超算与量子计算）；Department of Computer Science, University of Cologne（科隆大学计算机科学系）
The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is a prospective near-term quantum algorithm due to its modest circuit depth and promising benchmarks. However, an external parameter optimization required in QAOA could become a performance bottleneck. This motivates studies of the optimization landscape and search for heuristic ways of parameter initialization. In this work we visualize the optimization landscape of the QAOA applied to the MaxCut problem on random graphs, demonstrating that random initialization of the QAOA is prone to converging to local minima with sub-optimal performan…
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…
The quantum approximate optimisation algorithm (QAOA) was partially inspired by digitising quantum annealing. Based on this inspiration, we develop techniques to use the additional flexibility of a universal gate-model quantum computer to mitigate fluctuation effects which are known to distort the search space within quantum annealing and lead to false minima. We find that even just the added ability to take Pauli X measurements allows us to modify the mixer angles to counteract these effects by scaling mixer terms in a way proportional to the diagonal elements of the Fubini-Study metric. We f…
Recent advances in quantum technologies pave the way for noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, where quantum approximation optimization algorithms (QAOAs) constitute promising candidates for demonstrating tangible quantum advantages based on NISQ devices. In this paper, we consider the maximum likelihood (ML) detection problem of binary symbols transmitted over a multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) channel, where finding the optimal solution is exponentially hard using classical computers. Here, we apply the QAOA for the ML detection by encoding the problem of interest into a …
We study large-scale applications using a GPU-accelerated version of the massively parallel Jülich universal quantum computer simulator (JUQCS--G). First, we benchmark JUWELS Booster, a GPU cluster with 3744 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. Then, we use JUQCS--G to study the relation between quantum annealing (QA) and the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). We find that a very coarsely discretized version of QA, termed approximate quantum annealing (AQA), performs surprisingly well in comparison to the QAOA. It can either be used to initialize the QAOA, or to avoid the costly optim…
Reducing the Number of Qubits from $n^2$ to $n\log_{2} (n)$ to Solve the Traveling Salesman Problem with Quantum Computers: A Proposal for Demonstrating Quantum Supremacy in the NISQ Era
Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a promising hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for solving combinatorial optimization problems. However, it cannot overcome qubit limitation for large-scale problems. Furthermore, the execution time of QAOA scales exponentially with the problem size. We propose a Divide-and-Conquer QAOA (DC-QAOA) to address the above challenges for graph maximum cut (MaxCut) problem. The algorithm works by recursively partitioning a larger graph into smaller ones whose MaxCut solutions are obtained with small-size NISQ computers. The overall solution is retr…
The quantum-classical hybrid algorithm is an algorithm that holds promise in demonstrating the quantum advantage in NISQ devices. When running such algorithms, effects from quantum noise are inevitable. In our work, we consider a well-known hybrid algorithm, the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). We study the effects on QAOA from typical quantum noise channels and produce several numerical results. Our research indicates that the output state fidelity, the cost function, and its gradient obtained from QAOA decrease exponentially with respect to the number of gates and noise str…
We introduce OpenQAOA, a Python open-source multi-backend Software Development Kit to create, customise, and execute the Quantum Approximate Optimisation Algorithm (QAOA) on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices and simulators. OpenQAOA facilitates the creation of QAOA workflows, removing the more tedious and repetitive aspects of implementing variational quantum algorithms. It standardises and automates tasks such as circuit creation across different backends, ansatz parametrisation, the optimisation loop, the formatting of results, and extensions of QAOA such as Recursive QAOA. Ope…
One of the leading candidates for near-term quantum advantage is the class of Variational Quantum Algorithms, but these algorithms suffer from classical difficulty in optimizing the variational parameters as the number of parameters increases. Therefore, it is important to understand the expressibility and power of various ansätze to produce target states and distributions. To this end, we apply notions of emulation to Variational Quantum Annealing and the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) to show that QAOA is outperformed by variational annealing schedules with equivalent numb…
Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is one of the most promising quantum algorithms for the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. Quantifying the performance of QAOA in the near-term regime is of utmost importance. We perform a large-scale numerical study of the approximation ratios attainable by QAOA is the low- to medium-depth regime. To find good QAOA parameters we perform 990 million 10-qubit QAOA circuit evaluations. We find that the approximation ratio increases only marginally as the depth is increased, and the gains are offset by the increasing complexity of optimi…
We are in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices' era, in which quantum hardware has become available for application in real-world problems. However, demonstrating the usefulness of such NISQ devices are still rare. In this work, we consider a practical railway dispatching problem: delay and conflict management on single-track railway lines. We examine the issue of train dispatching consequences caused by the arrival of an already delayed train to the network segment being considered. This problem is computationally hard and needs to be solved almost in real-time. We introduce a …
In this paper, we eliminate the classical outer learning loop of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) and present a strategy to find good parameters for QAOA based on topological arguments of the problem graph and tensor network techniques. Starting from the observation of the concentration of control parameters of QAOA, we find a way to classically infer parameters which scales polynomially in the number of qubits and exponentially with the depth of the circuit. Using this strategy, the quantum processing unit (QPU) is only needed to infer the final state of QAOA. This method…
The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) by Farhi et al. is a quantum computational framework for solving quantum or classical optimization tasks. Here, we explore using QAOA for Binary Linear Least Squares (BLLS); a problem that can serve as a building block of several other hard problems in linear algebra, such as the Non-negative Binary Matrix Factorization (NBMF) and other variants of the Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) problem. Most of the previous efforts in quantum computing for solving these problems were done using the quantum annealing paradigm. For the scope of …
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 $p$-stage Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA$_p$) is a promising approach for combinatorial optimization on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, but its theoretical behavior is not well understood beyond $p=1$. We analyze QAOA$_2$ for the maximum cut problem (MAX-CUT), deriving a graph-size-independent expression for the expected cut fraction on any $D$-regular graph of girth $> 5$ (i.e. without triangles, squares, or pentagons). We show that for all degrees $D \ge 2$ and every $D$-regular graph $G$ of girth $> 5$, QAOA$_2$ has a larger expected cut fraction than …
In this paper I propose a new method of encoding discrete variables into Ising model qubits for quantum optimization. The new method is based on the physics of domain walls in one dimensional Ising spin chains. I find that these encodings and the encoding of arbitrary two variable interactions is possible with only two body Ising terms. Following on from similar results for the `one hot' method of encoding discrete variables [Hadfield et. al. Algorithms 12.2 (2019): 34] I also demonstrate that it is possible to construct two body mixer terms which do not leave the logical subspace, an importan…
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…
We propose a random circuit model to analyze the impact of noise on the performance of variational quantum circuits for classical optimization problems. Our model accounts for the propagation of arbitrary single qubit errors through the circuit. We find that even with a small noise rate, the quality of the obtained classical optima is low on average and a single-qubit error rate of $1 / nD$, where $n$ is the number of qubits and $D$ is the circuit depth, is needed for the possibility of a quantum advantage. We estimate that this translates to an error rate lower than $10^{-6}$ using QAOA for c…
Analog quantum algorithms are formulated in terms of Hamiltonians rather than unitary gates and include quantum adiabatic computing, quantum annealing, and the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). These algorithms are promising candidates for near-term quantum applications, but they often require fine tuning via the annealing schedule or variational parameters. In this work, we explore connections between these analog algorithms, as well as limits in which they become approximations of the optimal procedure.Notably, we explore how the optimal procedure approaches a smooth adiabat…
The intractability of deterministic solutions in solving $\mathcal{NP}$-Hard Combinatorial Optimisation Problems (COP) is well reported in the literature. One mechanism for overcoming this difficulty has been the use of efficient COP non-deterministic approaches. However, with the advent of quantum technology, these modern devices' potential to overcome this tractability limitation requires exploration. This paper juxtaposes classical and quantum optimisation algorithms' performance to solve two common COP, the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) and the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP). Two a…
The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) has been one of the leading candidates for near-term quantum advantage in gate-model quantum computers. From its inception, this algorithm has sparked the desire for comparison between gate-model and annealing platforms. When preparing problem statements for these algorithms, the predominant inclination has been to formulate a quadratic Hamiltonian. This paper gives an example of a graph coloring problem that, depending on its variable encoding scheme, optionally admits higher order terms. This paper presents evidence that the higher order …
In the present Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ), hybrid algorithms that leverage classical resources to reduce quantum costs are particularly appealing. We formulate and apply such a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm to a power system optimization problem called Unit Commitment, which aims to satisfy a target power load at minimal cost. Our algorithm extends the Quantum Approximation Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) with a classical minimizer in order to support mixed binary optimization. Using Qiskit, we simulate results for sample systems to validate the effectiveness of our approach. W…
Modern NISQ devices are subject to a variety of biases and sources of noise that degrade the solution quality of computations carried out on these devices. A natural question that arises in the NISQ era, is how fairly do these devices sample ground state solutions. To this end, we run five fair sampling problems (each with at least three ground state solutions) that are based both on quantum annealing and on the Grover Mixer-QAOA algorithm for gate-based NISQ hardware. In particular, we use seven IBM~Q devices, the Aspen-9 Rigetti device, the IonQ device, and three D-Wave quantum annealers. Fo…
