International Conference on Information and Communication Technology Convergence (ICTC)

Tunneling Effect of quantization-based optimization

Jinwuk Seok, Chang-Sik Cho

Published Oct 14, 2025• 0 citations

Abstract

In this paper, we present an analysis of the tunneling effect in the quantization-based optimization. We prove that, when the quantization step size is an exponential decay function with respect to an iteration, the quantized objective function admits a decomposition into longitudinal and transverse fields. From the perspective of quantum mechanics, since the transverse field gives the quantum tunneling effect, quantization-based optimization can outperform a conventional thermodynamics-based optimization scheme. Experimental results for a vanilla objective function and a typical combinatorial optimization problem, such as the traveling salesman problem, demonstrate that the presented analysis is valid.

DOI: 10.1109/ictc66702.2025.11388700

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