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arXiv:1911.08707 · Journal of Physics A Mathematical and Theoretical

Iterative classical superadiabatic algorithm for combinatorial optimization

Takuya Hatomura

Published Mar 26, 2020• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract We consider a classical and superadiabatic version of an iterative quantum adiabatic algorithm to solve combinatorial optimization problems. This algorithm is deterministic because it is based on purely classical dynamics, that is, it does not rely on any stochastic approach to mimic quantum dynamics. Moreover, we use the exact shortcut to adiabaticity for stationary states of classical spin systems, and thus the final state of an annealing process does not depend on the annealing time. We apply this algorithm to a certain class of hard instances of the 3-SAT problem, which is specially hard for purely adiabatic algorithms. We find that more than 90% of such 64-bits hard instances, which we try to solve, can be resolved by a few iteration. Our approach can also be used to analyze properties of instances themselves apart from stochastic uncertainty and shortage of adiabaticity.

DOI
10.1088/1751-8121/ab83c7

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Abstract We consider a classical and superadiabatic version of an iterative quantum adiabatic algorithm to solve combinatorial optimization problems. This algorithm is deterministic because it is based on purely classical dynamics, that is, it does not rely on any stochastic approach to mimic quantum dynamics. Moreover, we use the exact shortcut to adiabaticity for stationary states of classical spin systems, and thus the final state of an annealing process does not depend on the annealing time. We apply this algorithm to a certain class of hard instances of the 3-SAT problem, which is specially hard for purely adiabatic algorithms. We find that more than 90% of such 64-bits hard instances, which we try to solve, can be resolved by a few iteration. Our approach can also be used to analyze properties of instances themselves apart from stochastic uncertainty and shortage of adiabaticity.
We propose a simple construction of shortcuts to adiabaticity tracking instantaneous stationary states in classical spin systems without knowing tracked stationary states. In our construction, control fields of counterdiabatic driving are composed of state-dependent magnetic fields, which can be easily determined with an aid of numerical calculations. Easiness of our construction is a remarkable feature since it is usually a hard task to determine explicit expression of required counterdiabatic terms in many-body systems. We also argue that our method can be applied to solve combinatorial optimization problems by considering classical spin dynamics under a time-dependent Hamiltonian, which mimics the procedure of quantum annealing.
Advances in quantum algorithms suggest a tentative scaling advantage on certain combinatorial optimization problems. Recent work, however, has also reinforced the idea that barren plateaus render variational algorithms ineffective on large Hilbert spaces. Hence, finding annealing protocols by variation ultimately appears to be difficult. Similarly, the adiabatic theorem fails on hard problem instances with first-order quantum phase transitions. Here we show how to use the spin coherent-state path integral to shape the geometry of quantum adiabatic evolution, leading to annealing protocols at polynomial overhead that provide orders-of-magnitude improvements in the probability to measure optimal solutions, relative to linear protocols. These improvements are not obtained on a controllable toy problem but on randomly generated hard instances (Sherrington-Kirkpatrick and maximum 2-satisfiability), making them generic and robust. Our method works for large systems and may thus be used to improve the performance of state-of-the-art quantum devices.
Designing quantum algorithms with a speedup over their classical analogs is a central challenge in quantum information science. Motivated by recent experimental observations of a superlinear quantum speedup in solving the Maximum Independent Set problem on certain unit-disk graph instances [Ebadi et al., Science 376, 6598 (2022)], we develop a theoretical framework to analyze the relative performance of the optimized quantum adiabatic algorithm and a broad class of classical Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms. We outline conditions for the quantum adiabatic algorithm to achieve a quadratic speedup on hard problem instances featuring flat low-energy landscapes and provide example instances with either a quantum speedup or slowdown. We then introduce an additional local Hamiltonian with no sign problem to the optimized adiabatic algorithm to achieve a quadratic speedup over a wide class of classical simulated annealing, parallel tempering, and quantum Monte Carlo algorithms in solving these hard problem instances. Finally, we use this framework to analyze the experimental observations.
Combinatorial optimization has wide and high-value applications in many fields of science and industry, but solving general combinatorial optimization problems is non-deterministic polynomial time (NP) hard. Many such problems can be mapped onto the ground-state-search problems of the Ising model. Here, an iterative quantum algorithm based on quantum gradient descent to solve combinatorial optimization problems is introduced, where the initial state of a quantum register evolves over several iterations to a good approximation of the Ising-Hamiltonian ground state. We verified the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in solving the MaxCut problem for different types of undirected graphs by numerical simulations, and analyzed the robustness of the algorithm to errors by simulating random error and Gaussian error. We compared the performance of the algorithm with the quantum approximate optimization algorithm, and the results indicate that the proposed algorithm has comparable convergence performance. We also verified the feasibility of the algorithm by conducting experiments on a real quantum computer through the quantum cloud platform. Our work provides a potential method for solving combinatorial optimization problems on future quantum devices without the use of complex classical optimization loops.
The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is a hybrid variational quantum-classical algorithm that solves combinatorial optimization problems. While there is evidence suggesting that the fixed form of the standard QAOA ansatz is not optimal, there is no systematic approach for finding better ansätze. We address this problem by developing an iterative version of QAOA that is problem-tailored, and which can also be adapted to specific hardware constraints. We simulate the algorithm on a class of Max-Cut graph problems and show that it converges much faster than the standard QAOA, while simultaneously reducing the required number of CNOT gates and optimization parameters. We provide evidence that this speedup is connected to the concept of shortcuts to adiabaticity.
The path integral Monte Carlo simulated quantum annealing algorithm is applied to the optimization of a large hard instance of the random satisfiability problem (N = 10,000). The dynamical behavior of the quantum and the classical annealing are compared, showing important qualitative differences in the way of exploring the complex energy landscape of the combinatorial optimization problem. At variance with the results obtained for the Ising spin glass and for the traveling salesman problem, in the present case the linear-schedule quantum annealing performance is definitely worse than classical annealing. Nevertheless, a quantum cooling protocol based on field-cycling and able to outperform standard classical simulated annealing over short time scales is introduced.