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arXiv:2609.32627

Fewer Qubits, Better Choices: Coupling-Aware Sub-QUBO Selection for Quantum-Assisted Traffic Zone Partitioning

Qianwen Guo, Ruimin Ke

quant-phcs.ETSubmitted Sep 26, 2026• Announced Sep 29, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Near-term quantum optimizers accommodate roughly a hundred binary variables, requiring large Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization problems to be decomposed into hardware-sized subproblems while other variables remain fixed. Variables are typically selected by ranking the objective changes from individual flips. We show that this rule is uninformative once the incumbent is optimal under single-variable flips: every score represents a cost, while remaining improvements depend on overlooked pairwise interactions. A second-order expansion instead yields a prize-collecting densest-subgraph selection problem, solvable greedily in time linear in the number of variables, and two solver-free bounds bracketing the improvement achievable within a selected subset. On transportation networks from Chicago and Philadelphia, our rule with 16-variable subproblems outperforms random selection with 64, demonstrating that quadrupling device capacity cannot compensate for weaker selection. Replacing geometric adjacency with road-network connectivity widens the margin by a factor of 1.6-1.9. With the selection trace fixed, varying the fraction of subproblems solved on a 120-qubit device from zero to one leaves the final objective unchanged to six significant figures. At tested hardware-accessible sizes, gains therefore arise from selection rather than the backend. Hardware feasibility is limited by coupling terms: 120-variable problems fail to compile with 7,260 terms but succeed with 5,118. Compilation scales almost quadratically with term count and dominates execution cost, reaching 1,752 seconds versus 469 seconds of quantum processing.

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Algorithms and hardware for solving quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems have made significant recent progress. This advancement has focused attention on formulating combinatorial optimization problems as quadratic polynomials. To improve the performance of solving large QUBO problems, it is essential to minimize the number of binary variables used in the objective function. In this paper, we propose a QUBO formulation that offers a bit capacity advantage over conventional quadratization techniques. As a key application, this formulation significantly reduces the number of binary variables required for score-based Bayesian network structure learning. Experimental results on 16 instances, ranging from 37 to 223 variables, demonstrate that our approach requires fewer binary variables than quadratization by orders of magnitude. Moreover, an annealing machine that implement our formulation have outperformed existing algorithms in score maximization.

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Near-term quantum optimizers accommodate roughly a hundred binary variables, requiring large Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization problems to be decomposed into hardware-sized subproblems while other variables remain fixed. Variables are typically selected by ranking the objective changes from individual flips. We show that this rule is uninformative once the incumbent is optimal under single-variable flips: every score represents a cost, while remaining improvements depend on overlooked pairwise interactions. A second-order expansion instead yields a prize-collecting densest-subgraph selection problem, solvable greedily in time linear in the number of variables, and two solver-free bounds bracketing the improvement achievable within a selected subset. On transportation networks from Chicago and Philadelphia, our rule with 16-variable subproblems outperforms random selection with 64, demonstrating that quadrupling device capacity cannot compensate for weaker selection. Replacing geometric adjacency with road-network connectivity widens the margin by a factor of 1.6-1.9. With the selection trace fixed, varying the fraction of subproblems solved on a 120-qubit device from zero to one leaves the final objective unchanged to six significant figures. At tested hardware-accessible sizes, gains therefore arise from selection rather than the backend. Hardware feasibility is limited by coupling terms: 120-variable problems fail to compile with 7,260 terms but succeed with 5,118. Compilation scales almost quadratically with term count and dominates execution cost, reaching 1,752 seconds versus 469 seconds of quantum processing.
Partitioning transportation networks into balanced and spatially coherent traffic zones is a fundamental yet computationally challenging task in intelligent transportation systems. The resulting optimization problem exhibits dense interactions among decision variables and can be formulated as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) model. While quantum optimization naturally aligns with such quadratic energy representations, current noisy intermediate-scale quantum hardware imposes limitations on problem size, connectivity, and circuit reliability. This paper proposes an impact-driven hybrid quantum--classical optimization framework for traffic zone partitioning that bridges transportation-scale optimization models and practical gate-based quantum processors. Instead of static geographic decomposition, the method estimates the energy impact of decision variables and selectively assigns quantum computation to influential subproblems while a classical coordination loop maintains global feasibility. The framework is implemented using the Iskay optimizer and evaluated on the IBM Quantum System One backend. Experiments compare direct quantum optimization, classical iterative SubQUBO refinement, and the proposed hybrid approach. Results show that impact-guided decomposition improves convergence behavior and produces more coherent spatial partitions relative to classical refinement, while remaining consistent with hardware constraints. Although the hybrid method does not outperform the best direct quantum solution, it demonstrates a practical pathway toward scalable hybrid optimization for transportation applications under current quantum hardware conditions.
Large-scale combinatorial optimization is a challenge for near-term quantum computing because dense Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) formulations yield interaction graphs that exceed the limits of NISQ processors. This work introduces Hybrid Quantum Neighborhood Selection (HQNS), a hybrid framework mitigating this via stochastic frontier decomposition. Instead of encoding all N variables into a monolithic circuit, HQNS selects a compact frontier of F << N active variables per stage, freezing the rest into reduced QUBO coefficients. A multi-stage crawling procedure rotates these frontiers, letting local quantum subproblems refine a global solution. We evaluate HQNS on the Maximum Diversity Subset Selection Problem (MDSSP) across six scales, N up to 1000. Circuit burden is reduced from the dense QAOA requirement of O(N^2) two-qubit terms per layer to O(F^2) per stage, with total complexity governed by the number of stages and classical overhead. Benchmarks show that HQNS achieves competitive solution quality relative to parallel simulated annealing (SA) while maintaining bounded circuit width and stable QPU time. In the N=1000 benchmark over ten executions, HQNS preserves 99.9908% of the mean diversity score of an 11-restart parallel SA baseline, while reducing wall-clock time by 65.03%, peak CPU usage by 55.97%, and peak memory by 35.21%. Ablation shows performance depends on frontier size, warm-starts, CVaR filtering, and stochastic rotation. These results demonstrate that structured frontier decomposition makes variational optimization executable for dense QUBO instances unsuitable for direct QAOA on present hardware.
Large-scale combinatorial optimization remains demanding for classical heuristics, particularly when dense Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) formulations induce large memory footprints, high CPU utilization, and long execution times. While near-term quantum processors cannot yet deliver unconditional quantum advantage, hybrid architectures can provide practical value by reducing the resource burden. This paper presents a resource-efficiency study of Hybrid Quantum Neighborhood Selection (HQNS), a framework that decomposes large dense QUBO instances into bounded-width quantum subproblems via stochastic frontier selection. We evaluate HQNS on the Maximum Diversity Subset Selection Problem (MDSSP), focusing on the trade-off between solution quality retention and resource consumption. Benchmarks up to N=1000 candidates show that HQNS preserves 99.9908% of the mean diversity score of an 11-restart parallel Simulated Annealing baseline, while reducing wall-clock time by 94.91%, peak CPU utilization by 64.68%, and peak memory usage by 88.61%. The QPU execution time remains bounded within a 6-7 second envelope across scales, indicating that the quantum component is decoupled from the global QUBO dimension when the frontier size is fixed. These results suggest that HQNS provides a resource-aware pathway for deploying hybrid quantum optimization in practical large-scale settings, serving as an efficient architecture for incorporating near-term quantum processors into classical optimization pipelines.
Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) can be used to solve quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems. However, the size of the solvable problem is limited by the number of qubits. To leverage noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices to solve large-scale QUBO problems, one possible way is to decompose the full problem into multiple sub-problems, which we refer to as the Sub-QUBO Formalism. In this work, we enhance this formalism by proposing a sub-QUBO extraction protocol. To do so, we define a measure to quantify correlations between variables and use it to build a correlation matrix. This matrix serves as the input for clustering algorithms to group variables. Variables belonging to the same group form sub-QUBOs and are subsequently solved using QAOA. Our numerical analysis on several classes of randomly generated QUBO problems demonstrates that this grouping method outperforms previous approaches in terms of objective function values, while maintaining a comparable number of quantum subroutine calls. This method offers wide applicability for solving QUBO problems on NISQ devices.
The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) requires considered optimization problems to be translated into a compatible format. A popular transformation step in this pipeline involves the quadratization of higher-order binary optimization problems, translating them into Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) formulations through the introduction of auxiliary variables. Conventional algorithms for the selection of auxiliary variables often aim to minimize the total number of required variables without taking the constraints of the underlying quantum computer-in particular, the connectivity of its qubits-into consideration. This quickly results in interaction graphs that are incompatible with the target device, resulting in a substantial compilation overhead even with highly optimized compilers. To address this issue, this work presents a novel approach for the selection of auxiliary variables tailored for architectures with limited connectivity. By specifically constructing an interaction graph with a regular structure and a limited maximal degree of vertices, we find a way to construct QAOA circuits that can be mapped efficiently to a variety of architectures. We show that, compared to circuits constructed from a QUBO formulation using conventional auxiliary selection methods, the proposed approach reduces the circuit depth by almost 40%. An implementation of all proposed methods is publicly available at https://github.com/munich-quantum-toolkit/problemsolver.
Algorithms and hardware for solving quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems have made significant recent progress. This advancement has focused attention on formulating combinatorial optimization problems as quadratic polynomials. To improve the performance of solving large QUBO problems, it is essential to minimize the number of binary variables used in the objective function. In this paper, we propose a QUBO formulation that offers a bit capacity advantage over conventional quadratization techniques. As a key application, this formulation significantly reduces the number of binary variables required for score-based Bayesian network structure learning. Experimental results on 16 instances, ranging from 37 to 223 variables, demonstrate that our approach requires fewer binary variables than quadratization by orders of magnitude. Moreover, an annealing machine that implement our formulation have outperformed existing algorithms in score maximization.