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IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE)

QAOAwith $N\cdot p\geq 200$

Ruslan Shaydulin, Marco Pistoia

Published Sep 17, 2023• 11 citations
Publisher

Abstract

One of the central goals of the DARPA Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (ONISQ) program is to implement a hybrid quantum/classical optimization algorithm with high$N\cdot p$, where$N$is the number of qubits and$p$is the number of alternating applications of parameterized quantum operators in the protocol. In this note, we demonstrate the execution of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) applied to the MaxCut problem on non-planar 3-regular graphs with$N\cdot p$of up to 300 on the Quantinuum 81–1 trapped-ion quantum processor. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest$N\cdot p$demonstrated on hardware to date. Our demonstration highlights the rapid progress of quantum hardware.

DOI
10.1109/qce57702.2023.00121

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One of the central goals of the DARPA Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (ONISQ) program is to implement a hybrid quantum/classical optimization algorithm with high $N\cdot p$, where $N$ is the number of qubits and $p$ is the number of alternating applications of parameterized quantum operators in the protocol. In this note, we demonstrate the execution of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) applied to the MaxCut problem on non-planar 3-regular graphs with $N\cdot p$ of up to $320$ on the Quantinuum H1-1 and H2 trapped-ion quantum processors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest $N\cdot p$ demonstrated on hardware to date. Our demonstration highlights the rapid progress of quantum hardware.

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QAOAwith N⋅p≥200N\cdot p\geq 200N⋅p≥200
One of the central goals of the DARPA Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (ONISQ) program is to implement a hybrid quantum/classical optimization algorithm with highN⋅pN\cdot pN⋅p, whereNNNis the number of qubits andpppis the number of alternating applications of parameterized quantum operators in the protocol. In this note, we demonstrate the execution of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) applied to the MaxCut problem on non-planar 3-regular graphs withN⋅pN\cdot pN⋅pof up to 300 on the Quantinuum 81–1 trapped-ion quantum processor. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highestN⋅pN\cdot pN⋅pdemonstrated on hardware to date. Our demonstration highlights the rapid progress of quantum hardware.
QAOA with N⋅p≥200N\cdot p\geq 200N⋅p≥200
One of the central goals of the DARPA Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (ONISQ) program is to implement a hybrid quantum/classical optimization algorithm with high N⋅pN\cdot pN⋅p, where NNN is the number of qubits and ppp is the number of alternating applications of parameterized quantum operators in the protocol. In this note, we demonstrate the execution of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) applied to the MaxCut problem on non-planar 3-regular graphs with N⋅pN\cdot pN⋅p of up to 320320320 on the Quantinuum H1-1 and H2 trapped-ion quantum processors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest N⋅pN\cdot pN⋅p demonstrated on hardware to date. Our demonstration highlights the rapid progress of quantum hardware.
Quantum computers are devices, which allow more efficient solutions of problems as compared to their classical counterparts.As the timeline to developing a quantum-error corrected computer is unclear, the quantum computing community has dedicated much attention to developing algorithms for currently available noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers (NISQ).Thus far, within NISQ, optimization problems are one of the most commonly studied and are quite often tackled with the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA).This algorithm is best known for computing graph partitions with a maximal separation of edges (MaxCut), but can easily calculate other problems related to graphs.Here, I present a novel quantum optimization algorithm, which uses exponentially less qubits as compared to the QAOA while requiring a significantly reduced number of quantum operations to solve the MaxCut problem.Such an improved performance allowed me to partition graphs with 32 nodes on publicly available 5 qubit gate-based quantum computers without any preprocessing such as division of the graph into smaller subgraphs.These results represent a 40% increase in graph size as compared to state-of-art experiments on gate-based quantum computers such as Google Sycamore.The obtained lower bound is 54.9% on the solution for actual hardware benchmarks and 77.6% on ideal simulators of quantum computers.Furthermore, large-scale optimization problems represented by graphs of a 128 nodes are tackled with simulators of quantum computers, again without any predivision into smaller subproblems and a lower solution bound of 67.9% is achieved.The study presented here paves way to using powerful genetic optimizer in synergy with quantum computers.
The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is a quantum heuristic for combinatorial optimization that has been demonstrated to scale better than state-of-the-art classical solvers for some problems. For a given problem instance, QAOA performance depends crucially on the choice of the parameters. While average-case optimal parameters are available in many cases, meaningful performance gains can be obtained by fine-tuning these parameters for a given instance. This task is especially challenging, however, when the number of circuit executions (shots) is limited. In this work, we develop an end-to-end protocol that combines multiple parameter settings and fine-tuning techniques. We use large-scale numerical experiments to optimize the protocol for the shot-limited setting and observe that optimizers with the simplest internal model (linear) perform best. We implement the optimized pipeline on a trapped-ion processor using up to 32 qubits and 5 QAOA layers, and we demonstrate that the pipeline is robust to small amounts of hardware noise. To the best of our knowledge, these are the largest demonstrations of QAOA parameter fine-tuning on a trapped-ion processor in terms of two-qubit gate count.
Quantum computers are devices which allow the solution of problems unsolvable to their classical counterparts. As an error-corrected quantum computer is still a decade away the quantum computing community has dedicated much attention to developing algorithms for currently available Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum computers (NISQ). Thus far, within NISQ, optimization problems are one of the most commonly studied and are exclusively tackled with the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). This algorithm predominantly computes graph partitions with a maximal separation of edges (MaxCut), but can also be modified to calculate other properties of graphs. Here, I present a novel quantum optimization algorithm which uses exponentially less qubits as compared to the QAOA while requiring a significantly reduced number of quantum operations to solve the MaxCut problem. Such an improved performance allowed me to partition a graphs 32 nodes on publicly available 5 qubit gate-based solid state quantum devices without any preprocessing such as division of the graph into smaller subgraphs. This results represent a 40% increase in graph size as compared to state-of-art experiments on solid state devices such as Google Sycamore. The obtained lower bound is 54.9% on the solution for actual hardware benchmarks and 77.6% on ideal quantum simulators. Furthermore, large-scale optimization problems represented by graphs of a 128 nodes are tackled with quantum simulators, again without any pre-division into smaller subproblems and a lower solution bound of 67.9% is achieved.
In recent years, significant progress has been made in building quantum computers by several companies. Despite the progress, these noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers still suffer from several noises and errors such as measurement errors, multi-qubit gate errors, and worse, short decoherence times. Though quantum computer vendors are releasing better quantum computers in terms of Quantum Volume, the quantum device still remains far from quantum supremacy in practical problems. The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) was suggested to potentially demonstrate a computational advantage in combinatorial optimization problems on NISQ computers. In this paper, we optimize the QAOA circuits and to scale the problem size on IBM quantum processors. In addition, we study the effect of the length of the QAOA ansatz on IBM quantum processors and discuss optimal implementation methods for scalable QAOA. We test our implementations on the MaxCut problems.
The transition from theoretical quantum computing to practical real-world applications heavily relies onhybrid quantum-classical architectures designed for NoisyIntermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. Among these approaches, the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm(QAOA) is a prominent strategy for addressing complex combinatorial optimization challenges, such as the NP-hard MaxCut problem. Instead of performing the entire computationon a quantum processor, QAOA utilizes a quantum circuit toevaluate a parameterized cost function, whereas a classical optimizer refines the parameters iteratively. This study presentsa rigorous empirical evaluation comparing the performanceof QAOA against established classical solvers on small-scaleMax-Cut instances. All experiments were implemented andexecuted using Python (Qiskit Aer) on a state-vector simulator.Using Erdős–Rényi random graphs and regular graphs with4 to 20 nodes, we benchmark QAOA at depths p = 2 andp = 3 against simulated annealing, the Goemans–WilliamsonSDP-based algorithm, and a linear-time greedy heuristic. Ourexperimental results demonstrate that low-depth QAOA implementations exhibit severe performance degradation, prohibitive computational overhead (O(2^n) scaling), and low convergencerates compared to mature classical algorithms. At 20 nodes,QAOA (p = 2) achieves only a 0.467 approximation ratio versus0.856 for Goemans–Williamson, with a 210× runtime slowdownover greedy heuristics