The Kemeny Rank Aggregation (KRA) problem is a well-studied problem in the field of Social Choice with a variety of applications in many different areas like databases and search engines. Intuitively, given a set of votes over a set of candidates, the problem asks to find an aggregated ranking of candidates that minimizes the overall dissatisfaction concerning the votes. Recently, a diverse version of KRA was considered which asks for a sufficiently diverse set of sufficiently good solutions. The framework of diversity of solutions is a young and thriving topic in the field of artificial intelligence. The main idea is to provide the user with not just one, but with a set of different solutions, enabling her to pick a sufficiently good solution that satisfies additional subjective criteria that are hard or impossible to model. In this work, we use a quantum annealer to solve the KRA problem and to compute a representative set of solutions. Quantum annealing is a meta search heuristic that does not only show promising runtime behavior on currently existing prototypes but also samples the solutions space in an inherently different way, making use of quantum effects. We describe how KRA instances can be solved by a quantum annealer and provide an implementation as well as experimental evaluations. As existing quantum annealers are still restricted in their number of qubits, we further implement two different data reduction rules that can split an instance into a set of smaller instances. In our evaluation, we compare classical heuristics that allow to sample multiple solutions such as simulated annealing and local search with quantum annealing performed on a physical quantum annealer. We compare runtime, quality of solution, and diversity of solutions, with and without applying preceding data reduction rules.
The Kemeny Rank Aggregation (KRA) problem is a well-studied problem in the field of Social Choice with a variety of applications in many different areas like databases and search engines. Intuitively, given a set of votes over a set of candidates, the problem asks to find an aggregated ranking of candidates that minimizes the overall dissatisfaction concerning the votes. Recently, a diverse version of KRA was considered which asks for a sufficiently diverse set of sufficiently good solutions. The framework of diversity of solutions is a young and thriving topic in the field of artificial intelligence. The main idea is to provide the user with not just one, but with a set of different solutions, enabling her to pick a sufficiently good solution that satisfies additional subjective criteria that are hard or impossible to model. In this work, we use a quantum annealer to solve the KRA problem and to compute a representative set of solutions. Quantum annealing is a meta search heuristic that does not only show promising runtime behavior on currently existing prototypes but also samples the solutions space in an inherently different way, making use of quantum effects. We describe how KRA instances can be solved by a quantum annealer and provide an implementation as well as experimental evaluations. As existing quantum annealers are still restricted in their number of qubits, we further implement two different data reduction rules that can split an instance into a set of smaller instances. In our evaluation, we compare classical heuristics that allow to sample multiple solutions such as simulated annealing and local search with quantum annealing performed on a physical quantum annealer. We compare runtime, quality of solution, and diversity of solutions, with and without applying preceding data reduction rules.
Consensus ranking is a technique used to derive a single ranking that best represents the preferences of multiple individuals or systems. It aims to aggregate different rankings into one that minimizes overall disagreement or distance from each of the individual rankings. Kemeny ranking aggregation, in particular, is a widely used method in decision-making and social choice, with applications ranging from search engines to music recommendation systems. It seeks to determine a consensus ranking of a set of candidates based on the preferences of a group of individuals. However, existing quantum annealing algorithms face challenges in efficiently processing large datasets with many candidates. In this paper, we propose a method to improve the performance of quantum annealing for Kemeny rank aggregation. Our approach identifies the pairwise preference matrix that represents the solution list and subsequently reconstructs the ranking using classical methods. This method already yields better results than existing approaches. Furthermore, we present a range of enhancements that significantly improve the proposed method's performance, thereby increasing the number of candidates that can be effectively handled. Finally, we evaluate the efficiency of our approach by comparing its performance and execution time with that of KwikSort, a well-known approximate algorithm.
The aim of a ranking aggregation problem is to combine several rankings into a single one that best represents them. A common method for solving this problem is due to Kemeny and selects as the aggregated ranking the one that minimizes the sum of the Kendall distances to the rankings to be aggregated. Unfortunately, the identification of the said ranking—called the Kemeny ranking—is known to be a computationally expensive task. In this paper, we study different ways of computing the Kemeny ranking with quantum optimization algorithms, and in particular, we provide some alternative formulations for the search for the Kemeny ranking as an optimization problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that this problem is addressed with quantum techniques. We propose four different ways of formulating the problem, one novel to this work. Two different quantum optimization algorithms—Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm and Quantum Adiabatic Computing—are used to evaluate each of the different formulations. The experimental results show that the choice of the formulation plays a big role on the performance of the quantum optimization algorithms.
Solving discrete NP-hard problems is an important part of scientific discoveries and operations research as well as many commercial applications. A commonly used metric to compare meta-heuristic solvers is the time required to obtain an optimal solution, known as time to solution. However, for some applications it is desirable to have a set of high-quality and diverse solutions, instead of a single optimal one. For these applications, time to solution may not be informative of the performance of a solver, and another metric would be necessary. In particular, it is not known how well quantum solvers sample the configuration space in comparison to their classical counterparts. Here, we apply a recently introduced collective distance measure in solution space to quantify diversity by Mohseni et. al. and, based on that, we employ time-to-diversity as a metric for evaluation of meta-heuristics solvers. We use this measure to compare the performance of the D-Wave quantum annealing processor with a few classical heuristic solvers on a set of synthetic problems and show that D-Wave quantum annealing processor is indeed a competitive heuristic, and on many instances outperforms state-of-the-art classical solvers, while it remains on par on other instances. This suggests that a portfolio solver that combines quantum and classical solutions may win over all solvers.
Sampling a diverse set of high-quality solutions for hard optimization problems is of great practical relevance in many scientific disciplines and applications, such as artificial intelligence and operations research. One of the main open problems is the lack of ergodicity, or mode collapse, for typical stochastic solvers based on Monte Carlo techniques leading to poor generalization or lack of robustness to uncertainties. Currently, there is no universal metric to quantify such performance deficiencies across various solvers. Here, we introduce a new diversity measure for quantifying the number of independent approximate solutions for NP-hard optimization problems. To test this metric, we compare the sampling power of various quantum annealing strategies. We show that the inhomogeneous quantum annealing schedules can redistribute and suppress the emergence of topological defects by controlling space-time separated critical fronts, leading to an advantage over standard quantum annealing schedules with respect to both Time-To-Solution (TTS) and Time-To-Diversity (TTD) for finding rare solutions. Using Path-Integral Monte Carlo simulations for up to 1600 qubits, we demonstrate that non-equilibrium driving of quantum fluctuations, guided by efficient approximate tensor network contractions, can significantly reduce the fraction of hard instances for random frustrated 2D spin-glasses with local fields. Specifically, we observe that by creating a class of algorithmic quantum phase transitions the diversity of solutions can be enhanced by up to 40% with the fraction of hard-to-sample instances reducing by more than 25%.
Abstract The field of Quantum Computing has gathered significant popularity in recent years and a large number of papers have studied its effectiveness in tackling many tasks. We focus in particular on Quantum Annealing (QA), a meta-heuristic solver for Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problems. It is known that the effectiveness of QA is dependent on the task itself, as is the case for classical solvers, but there is not yet a clear understanding of which are the characteristics of a problem that make it difficult to solve with QA. In this work, we propose a new methodology to study the effectiveness of QA based on meta-learning models. To do so, we first build a dataset composed of more than five thousand instances of ten different optimization problems. We define a set of more than a hundred features to describe their characteristics and solve them with both QA and three classical solvers. We publish this dataset online for future research. Then, we train multiple meta-models to predict whether QA would solve that instance effectively and use them to probe which features with the strongest impact on the effectiveness of QA. Our results indicate that it is possible to accurately predict the effectiveness of QA, validating our methodology. Furthermore, we observe that the distribution of the problem coefficients representing the bias and coupling terms is very informative in identifying the probability of finding good solutions, while the density of these coefficients alone is not enough. The methodology we propose allows to open new research directions to further our understanding of the effectiveness of QA, by probing specific dimensions or by developing new QUBO formulations that are better suited for the particular nature of QA. Furthermore, the proposed methodology is flexible and can be extended or used to study other quantum or classical solvers.
Sampling a diverse set of high-quality solutions for hard optimization problems is of great practical relevance in many scientific disciplines and applications, such as artificial intelligence and operations research. One of the main open problems is the lack of ergodicity, or mode collapse, for typical stochastic solvers based on Monte Carlo techniques leading to poor generalization or lack of robustness to uncertainties. Currently, there is no universal metric to quantify such performance deficiencies across various solvers. Here, we introduce a new diversity measure for quantifying the number of independent approximate solutions for NP-hard optimization problems. Among others, it allows benchmarking solver performance by a required time-to-diversity (TTD), a generalization of often used time-to-solution (TTS). We illustrate this metric by comparing the sampling power of various quantum annealing strategies. In particular, we show that the inhomogeneous quantum annealing schedules can redistribute and suppress the emergence of topological defects by controlling space-time separated critical fronts, leading to an advantage over standard quantum annealing schedules with respect to both TTS and TTD for finding rare solutions. Using path-integral Monte Carlo simulations for up to 1600 qubits, we demonstrate that nonequilibrium driving of quantum fluctuations, guided by efficient approximate tensor network contractions, can significantly reduce the fraction of hard instances for random frustrated 2D spin glasses with local fields. Specifically, we observe that by creating a class of algorithmic quantum phase transitions, the diversity of solutions can be enhanced by up to 40% with the fraction of hard-to-sample instances reducing by more than 25%.