Variational quantum algorithms have become a standard approach for solving a wide range of problems on near-term quantum computers. Identifying an appropriate ansatz configuration for variational algorithms, however, remains a challenging task, especially when taking into account restrictions imposed by real quantum platforms. This motivated the development of digital-analog quantum circuits, where sequences of quantum gates are alternated with natural Hamiltonian evolutions. A prominent example is the use of the controllable long-range Ising interaction induced in ion-based quantum computers. This interaction has recently been applied to develop an algorithm similar to the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA), but native to the ion hardware. The performance of this algorithm has demonstrated a strong dependence on the strengths of the individual ion-ion interactions, which serve as ansatz hyperparameters. In this work, we propose a heuristic for identifying a problem-specific ansatz configuration, which enhances the trainability of the ion native digital-analog circuit. The proposed approach is systematically applied to random instances of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick Hamiltonian for up to 15 qubits, providing favorable cost landscapes. As the result, the developed approach identifies a well-trainable ion native ansatz, which requires a lower circuit depth to solve specific problems as compared to standard QAOA. This brings the algorithm one step closer to its large scale practical implementation.
Variational quantum algorithms have become a standard approach for solving a wide range of problems on near-term quantum computers. Identifying an appropriate ansatz configuration for variational algorithms, however, remains a challenging task, especially when taking into account restrictions imposed by real quantum platforms. This motivated the development of digital-analog quantum circuits, where sequences of quantum gates are alternated with natural Hamiltonian evolutions. A prominent example is the use of the controllable long-range Ising interaction induced in ion-based quantum computers. This interaction has recently been applied to develop an algorithm similar to the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA), but native to the ion hardware. The performance of this algorithm has demonstrated a strong dependence on the strengths of the individual ion-ion interactions, which serve as ansatz hyperparameters. In this work, we propose a heuristic for identifying a problem-specific ansatz configuration, which enhances the trainability of the ion native digital-analog circuit. The proposed approach is systematically applied to random instances of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick Hamiltonian for up to 15 qubits, providing favorable cost landscapes. As the result, the developed approach identifies a well-trainable ion native ansatz, which requires a lower circuit depth to solve specific problems as compared to standard QAOA. This brings the algorithm one step closer to its large scale practical implementation.
Variational quantum algorithms involve training parametrized quantum circuits using a classical coprocessor. An important variational algorithm, designed for combinatorial optimization, is the quantum approximate optimization algorithm. Realization of this algorithm on any modern quantum processor requires either embedding a problem instance into a Hamiltonian or emulating the corresponding propagator by a gate sequence. For a vast range of problem instances this is impossible due to current circuit depth and hardware limitations. Hence we adapt the variational approach---using ion-native Hamiltonians---to create ansatz families that can prepare the ground states of more general problem Hamiltonians. We analytically determine symmetry protected classes that make certain problem instances inaccessible unless this symmetry is broken. We exhaustively search over six qubits and consider up to 20 circuit layers, demonstrating that symmetry can be broken to solve all problem instances of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick Hamiltonian. Going further, we numerically demonstrate training convergence and levelwise improvement for up to 20 qubits. Specifically these findings widen the class problem instances which might be solved by ion based quantum processors. Generally these results serve as a test bed for quantum approximate optimization approaches based on system native Hamiltonians and symmetry protection.
Quantum computers and simulators may offer significant advantages over their classical counterparts, providing insights into quantum many-body systems and possibly improving performance for solving exponentially hard problems, such as optimization and satisfiability. Here, we report the implementation of a low-depth Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) using an analog quantum simulator. We estimate the ground-state energy of the Transverse Field Ising Model with long-range interactions with tunable range, and we optimize the corresponding combinatorial classical problem by sampling the QAOA output with high-fidelity, single-shot, individual qubit measurements. We execute the algorithm with both an exhaustive search and closed-loop optimization of the variational parameters, approximating the ground-state energy with up to 40 trapped-ion qubits. We benchmark the experiment with bootstrapping heuristic methods scaling polynomially with the system size. We observe, in agreement with numerics, that the QAOA performance does not degrade significantly as we scale up the system size and that the runtime is approximately independent from the number of qubits. We finally give a comprehensive analysis of the errors occurring in our system, a crucial step in the path forward toward the application of the QAOA to more general problem instances.
In recent years, Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) have emerged as a promising approach for solving optimization problems on quantum computers in the NISQ era. However, one limitation of VQAs is their reliance on fixed-structure circuits, which may not be taylored for specific problems or hardware configurations. A leading strategy to address this issue are Adaptative VQAs, which dynamically modify the circuit structure by adding and removing gates, and optimize their parameters during the training. Several Adaptative VQAs, based on heuristics such as circuit shallowness, entanglement capability and hardware compatibility, have already been proposed in the literature, but there is still lack of a systematic comparison between the different methods. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by analyzing three Adaptative VQAs: Evolutionary Variational Quantum Eigensolver (EVQE), Variable Ansatz (VAns), already proposed in the literature, and Random Adapt-VQE (RA-VQE), a random approach we introduce as a baseline. In order to compare these algorithms to traditional VQAs, we also include the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) in our analysis. We apply these algorithms to QUBO problems and study their performance by examining the quality of the solutions found and the computational times required. Additionally, we investigate how the choice of the hyperparameters can impact the overall performance of the algorithms, highlighting the importance of selecting an appropriate methodology for hyperparameter tuning. Our analysis sets benchmarks for Adaptative VQAs designed for near-term quantum devices and provides valuable insights to guide future research in this area.
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 investigate 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 parameters can be found in polynomial time for a test dataset we consider. This new ansatz gives a 33% increase in the approximation ratio for an infinite family of MaxCut instances over QAOA. The optimal performance is lower bounded by the conventional ansatz, and we present empirical results for graphs on eight vertices that one layer of the multi-angle anstaz is comparable to three layers of the traditional ansatz on MaxCut problems. Similarly, multi-angle QAOA yields a higher approximation ratio than QAOA at the same depth on a collection of MaxCut instances on fifty and one-hundred vertex graphs. Many of the optimized parameters are found to be zero, so their associated gates can be removed from the circuit, further decreasing the circuit depth. These results indicate that multi-angle QAOA requires shallower circuits to solve problems than QAOA, making it more viable for near-term intermediate-scale quantum devices.
We develop a hardware-efficient ansatz for variational optimization, derived from existing ansatze in the literature, that parametrizes subsets of all interactions in the Cost Hamiltonian in each layer. We treat gate orderings as a variational parameter and observe that doing so can provide significant performance boosts in experiments. We carried out experimental runs of a compilation-optimized implementation of fully-connected Sherrington-Kirkpatrick Hamiltonians on a 50-qubit linear-chain subsystem of Rigetti’s Aspen-M-3 transmon processor. Our results indicate that, for the best circuit designs tested, the average performance at optimized angles and gate orderings increases with circuit depth (using more parameters), despite the presence of a high level of noise. We report performance significantly better than using a random guess oracle for circuits involving up to ≃ 5, 000 two-qubit and ≃ 5, 000 one-qubit native gates. We additionally discuss various takeaways of our results toward more effective utilization of current and future quantum processors for optimization.
The main object of study of this work is the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) —the best-known heuristic quantum algorithm for addressing combinatorial optimization problems. Despite its popularity, QAOA poses major challenges. Namely, its performance remains poorly understood, especially in the low depth regime most relevant to near-term quantum computing. Besides, the algorithm is of variational nature, relying on several hyperparameters to be classically trained. In this work, we contribute to addressing these issues by developing techniques to understand the performance of QAOA at low depth, and deducing from these pretrained hyperparameters, thereby eliminating or considerably reducing the need for a classical optimization loop. We first consider applying QAOA to constraint satisfaction problems with the goal of maximizing the algorithm’s approximation ratio (fraction of satisfied constraints). As a particular example, we consider QAOA applied to MAXCUT on non-regular graphs, showing how analytic techniques provide good guess hyperparameters in this setting. Next, we analyze the performance of QAOA on a well-studied constraint satisfaction problem: random k-SAT. In this case, the performance is measured by the probability of finding an assignment satisfying all constraints (“success probability”). To estimate this quantity, we develop new techniques, mapping quantum expectation values of the QAOA circuits to classical spin models. We further show how these techniques can be generalized to a larger family of random constraint satisfaction problems. We conclude the work by two feasibility studies inspired by real-world use cases encountered in collaborations with industrial partners: peptide sampling, and solving flow problems. These problems are naturally phrased by encoding combinatorial variables in qudits, a relatively unexplored setting in the existing literature. We present partial analytic and numerical results for optimal QAOA hyperparameters and the scaling of its success probability in this framework, underlining potential specific difficulties when using QAOA with qudits.