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arXiv:2108.03185 · Physical Review A

Genetic optimization of quantum annealing

Pratibha Raghupati Hegde, Gianluca Passarelli, Annarita Scocco, Procolo Lucignano

Published Jan 26, 2022• 36 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The study of optimal control of quantum annealing by modulating the pace of evolution and by introducing a counterdiabatic potential has gained significant attention in recent times. In this work, we present a numerical approach based on genetic algorithms to improve the performance of quantum annealing, which evades the Landau-Zener transitions to navigate to the ground state of the final Hamiltonian with high probability. We optimize the annealing schedules starting from the polynomial ansatz by treating their coefficients as chromosomes of the genetic algorithm. We also explore shortcuts to adiabaticity by computing a practically feasible $k$-local optimal driving operator, showing that even for $k=1$ we achieve substantial improvement of the fidelity over the standard annealing solution. With these genetically optimized annealing schedules and/or optimal driving operators, we are able to perform quantum annealing in relatively short timescales and with higher fidelity compared to traditional approaches.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.105.012612

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The study of optimal control of quantum annealing by modulating the pace of evolution and by introducing a counterdiabatic potential has gained significant attention in recent times. In this work, we present a numerical approach based on genetic algorithms to improve the performance of quantum annealing, which evades the Landau-Zener transitions to navigate to the ground state of the final Hamiltonian with high probability. We optimize the annealing schedules starting from the polynomial ansatz by treating their coefficients as chromosomes of the genetic algorithm. We also explore shortcuts to adiabaticity by computing a practically feasible kkk-local optimal driving operator, showing that even for k=1k=1k=1 we achieve substantial improvement of the fidelity over the standard annealing solution. With these genetically optimized annealing schedules and/or optimal driving operators, we are able to perform quantum annealing in relatively short timescales and with higher fidelity compared to traditional approaches.
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We review here some recent work in the field of quantum annealing, alias adiabatic quantum computation. The idea of quantum annealing is to perform optimization by a quantum adiabatic evolution which tracks the ground state of a suitable time-dependent Hamiltonian, where 'ℏ' is slowly switched off. We illustrate several applications of quantum annealing strategies, starting from textbook toy-models—double-well potentials and other one-dimensional examples, with and without disorder. These examples display in a clear way the crucial differences between classical and quantum annealing. We then discuss applications of quantum annealing to challenging hard optimization problems, such as the random Ising model, the travelling salesman problem and Boolean satisfiability problems. The techniques used to implement quantum annealing are either deterministic Schrödinger's evolutions, for the toy models, or path-integral Monte Carlo and Green's function Monte Carlo approaches, for the hard optimization problems. The crucial role played by disorder and the associated non-trivial Landau–Zener tunnelling phenomena is discussed and emphasized.
Suppressing unwanted transitions out of the instantaneous ground state is a major challenge in unitary adiabatic quantum computation. A recent approach consists in building counterdiabatic potentials approximated using variational strategies. In this contribution, we extend this variational approach to Lindbladian dynamics, having as a goal the suppression of diabatic transitions between pairs of Jordan blocks in quantum annealing. We show that, surprisingly, unitary counterdiabatic Ans\"atze are successful for dissipative dynamics as well, allowing for easier experimental implementations compared to Lindbladian Ans\"atze involving dissipation. Our approach not only guarantees improvements of open-system adiabaticity but also enhances the success probability of quantum annealing.
This paper proposes a novel approach to optimization problems by integrating quantum entanglement with the Genetic Algorithm (GA). The core idea is to leverage the inherent parallelism and enhanced information transfer capabilities of quantum entanglement to significantly improve the search performance of the GA. We represent genetic algorithm chromosomes as quantum states and employ quantum entanglement to facilitate rapid information exchange and crossover operations across multiple qubits. This mechanism allows for parallel exploration of the search space, mitigating the limitations of traditional GA's tendency towards local optima. The theoretical framework and the underlying principles are presented, demonstrating the potential for the Quantum Entanglement Genetic Algorithm (QGA) to accelerate the solution of complex optimization problems. The algorithm's effectiveness is discussed through a mathematical formulation, focusing on the key components of the QGA and its advantages over conventional GA. The ultimate goal is to demonstrate a robust and efficient method for tackling challenging optimization tasks.
Diabatic quantum annealing with variationally optimized schedules can exhibit exponential speedups over conventional adiabatic quantum annealing, as was demonstrated numerically for a frustrated Ising ring model by C{ô}t{é} et al. Here we identify Landau-Zener-St{ü}ckelberg interference as the underlying mechanism for this speedup, and based on this insight we propose a variational schedule ansatz with far fewer parameters. This simplified ansatz allows us to show analytically that the classical optimization of the schedule parameters can be done in polynomial time and discuss conditions when we expect this type of mechanism to provide speedups over adiabatic annealing. Furthermore, we provide an analytical argument that coherence is an essential resource for this mechanism, which we verify numerically. We perform extensive numerical tests of the proposed ansatz and observe substantial improvements over adiabatic annealing and competitive performance in particularly challenging problem instances, including a well-studied MAXCUT instance commonly used for benchmarking. Our work shows that explicitly leveraging physical mechanisms can lead to more effective designs of variational annealing algorithms.
Abstract Adiabatic quantum computing and optimization have garnered much attention recently as possible models for achieving a quantum advantage over classical approaches to optimization and other special purpose computations. Both techniques are probabilistic in nature and the minimum gap between the ground state and first excited state of the system during evolution is a major factor in determining the success probability. In this work we investigate a strategy for increasing the minimum gap and success probability by introducing intermediate Hamiltonians that modify the evolution path between initial and final Hamiltonians. We focus on an optimization problem relevant to recent hardware implementations and present numerical evidence for the existence of a purely local intermediate Hamiltonian that achieve the optimum performance in terms of pushing the minimum gap to one of the end points of the evolution. As a part of this study we develop a convex optimization formulation of the search for optimal adiabatic schedules that makes this computation more tractable, and which may be of independent interest. We further study the effectiveness of random intermediate Hamiltonians on the minimum gap and success probability, and empirically find that random Hamiltonians have a significant probability of increasing the success probability, but only by a modest amount.