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The overlap gap property and its implication for the quantum approximate optimisation algorithm

Mark Xin Hong Goh

Published Jan 1, 2026• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

The main focus of this thesis can be framed in the following question: How does the presence and absence of the overlap gap property (OGP) affect quantum algorithms such as the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA)? The OGP, a topological property that occurs when the set of near optimal solutions exhibits a form of strong clustering, is known to inhibit the performance of various classes of algorithms. In classical algorithms, the OGP acts a tight upper bound on many different classes of algorithms including online algorithms and ‘stable’ algorithms such as Lipschitz algorithms. For quantum algorithms, the OGP is known to inhibit the algorithmic performance at shallow depth such as logarithmic depth quantum annealing. This thesis focuses on how the OGP affects the QAOA and advances the understanding of the run-time required for quantum advantage. Improving upon previous results, I prove that at logarithmic depth, the OGP acts as a strict upper bound for the QAOA thus proving that there is indeed no quantum advantage at logarithmic depth. Complementing the analytic result above, I similarly proved that the performance of the mean-field approximate optimization algorithm (MF-AOA), a classical algorithm inspired by the QAOA, is likewise strictly upper-bounded by the OGP. Thus, for the QAOA to exhibit quantum advantage over its classical counterpart, one requires sufficiently high depth such that the QAOA is able to give an output that is greater than the OGP value. Together with my collaborator, we also provide numerical evidence that the depth required for quantum advantage in the QAOA is super-polynomial if one requires the approximation ratio to be higher than the OGP value. While this thesis adds onto the growing body of literature of how the OGP acts as a signal of algorithmic hardness for many classes of algorithms, this work also provides the first instance of how the OGP can inform algorithmic design. This thesis provides evidence that in the presence of the OGP, the variational parameters used to optimize the QAOA’s output at polynomial depth differ depending on whether one wishes to maximize the approximation ratio or to minimize the time to find the optimal solution.Understanding the right schedule is important for designing an optimal quantum control to steer a quantum state into its desired form. Our results also indicate that problems that do not exhibit the OGP are likely to be solved efficiently by quantum annealing or adiabatic quantum computing since the optimal schedule found in the QAOA follows an adiabatic schedule. Lastly, this thesis provides a novel use of the QAOA, that of identifying use cases where efficient classical algorithms exists but are yet to be discovered. Specifically,by applying logarithmic depth QAOA to the binary paint shop problem (BPSP), we show that the performance of the QAOA surpasses that of all known polynomial time classical algorithms. However, given the failure of logarithmic depth QAOA to outperform classical algorithms on sparse optimization problems such as the BPSP, this implies that there must be an efficient classical algorithm that beats all currently known heuristic methods. Applying the MF-AOA to the BPSP, we find that it significantly outperforms all known classical heuristics and applications of the QAOA (and its variants) on the BPSP.

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The main focus of this thesis can be framed in the following question: How does the presence and absence of the overlap gap property (OGP) affect quantum algorithms such as the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA)? The OGP, a topological property that occurs when the set of near optimal solutions exhibits a form of strong clustering, is known to inhibit the performance of various classes of algorithms. In classical algorithms, the OGP acts a tight upper bound on many different classes of algorithms including online algorithms and ‘stable’ algorithms such as Lipschitz algorithms. For quantum algorithms, the OGP is known to inhibit the algorithmic performance at shallow depth such as logarithmic depth quantum annealing. This thesis focuses on how the OGP affects the QAOA and advances the understanding of the run-time required for quantum advantage. Improving upon previous results, I prove that at logarithmic depth, the OGP acts as a strict upper bound for the QAOA thus proving that there is indeed no quantum advantage at logarithmic depth. Complementing the analytic result above, I similarly proved that the performance of the mean-field approximate optimization algorithm (MF-AOA), a classical algorithm inspired by the QAOA, is likewise strictly upper-bounded by the OGP. Thus, for the QAOA to exhibit quantum advantage over its classical counterpart, one requires sufficiently high depth such that the QAOA is able to give an output that is greater than the OGP value. Together with my collaborator, we also provide numerical evidence that the depth required for quantum advantage in the QAOA is super-polynomial if one requires the approximation ratio to be higher than the OGP value. While this thesis adds onto the growing body of literature of how the OGP acts as a signal of algorithmic hardness for many classes of algorithms, this work also provides the first instance of how the OGP can inform algorithmic design. This thesis provides evidence that in the presence of the OGP, the variational parameters used to optimize the QAOA’s output at polynomial depth differ depending on whether one wishes to maximize the approximation ratio or to minimize the time to find the optimal solution.Understanding the right schedule is important for designing an optimal quantum control to steer a quantum state into its desired form. Our results also indicate that problems that do not exhibit the OGP are likely to be solved efficiently by quantum annealing or adiabatic quantum computing since the optimal schedule found in the QAOA follows an adiabatic schedule. Lastly, this thesis provides a novel use of the QAOA, that of identifying use cases where efficient classical algorithms exists but are yet to be discovered. Specifically,by applying logarithmic depth QAOA to the binary paint shop problem (BPSP), we show that the performance of the QAOA surpasses that of all known polynomial time classical algorithms. However, given the failure of logarithmic depth QAOA to outperform classical algorithms on sparse optimization problems such as the BPSP, this implies that there must be an efficient classical algorithm that beats all currently known heuristic methods. Applying the MF-AOA to the BPSP, we find that it significantly outperforms all known classical heuristics and applications of the QAOA (and its variants) on the BPSP.
In this paper, we prove that the Mean-Field Approximate Optimization Algorithm (MF-AOA), a quantum-inspired classical algorithm of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), is unable to give arbitrary near optimal solution for problems exhibiting the Overlap Gap Property (OGP). We show this by relating the MF-AOA to finite-memory Approximate Message Passing (AMP) algorithms, which are known to be limited in performance by the OGP. Thus, our paper argues that problems exhibiting the OGP are one such instance where the QAOA can outperform the MF-AOA and AMP algorithms in general. We supplement this by numerically simulating the performance of the QAOA on instances of Max-444-XORSAT that exhibit the OGP and find that the QAOA is able to surpass the barrier, while our finite-size scaling analysis favors a super-polynomial over a polynomial depth dependence. In addition, we observe a non-differentiable point in the performance of the QAOA near by the OGP barrier, where the optimal QAOA parameters change from an adiabatic to a non-adiabatic schedule.
The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a quantum algorithm designed for combinatorial optimization problem. We show that under the assumption that the Overlap Gap Property (OGP) in the solution space for the Max-q-XORSAT is a monotonic increasing function, the swapping of limits in QAOA leads to suboptimal results limited by the OGP. Furthermore, since the performance of QAOA for the pure q-spin model matches asymptotically for Max-q-XORSAT on large-girth regular hypergraph, we show that the average-case value obtained by QAOA for the pure q-spin model for even q≥4 is bounded away from optimality even when the algorithm runs indefinitely. This suggests that a necessary condition for the validity of limit swapping in QAOA is the absence of OGP in a given combinatorial optimization problem. A corollary of this is that the spectral gap of a Hamiltonian exhibiting the OGP will close in the thermodynamic limit resulting in a limitation of the quantum adiabatic theorem and efficient optimization of QAOA parameters. Furthermore, the results suggests that even when sub-optimised, the performance of QAOA on spin glass is equal in performance to Montanari's classical algorithm in solving the mean field spin glass problem, the best known classical algorithm.
Abstract The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a quantum algorithm designed for Combinatorial Optimization Problem (COP). We show that if a local algorithm is limited in performance at logarithmic depth for a spin glass type COP with an underlying Erdös-Renyi hypergraph, then a random regular hypergraph is similarly limited in performance as well. As such, we re-derived the fact that the average-case value obtained by the QAOA for even q ≥ 4, Max- q -XORSAT is bounded away from optimality when optimized using asymptotic analysis due to the Overlap Gap Property (OGP). While this result was proven before, the proof is rather technical compared to ours. In addition, we show that the earlier result implicitly also implies limitation at logarithmic depth p ≤ ϵ log n , providing an improvement over limitation at constant depth. Furthermore, the extension to logarithmic depth leads to a tightening of the upper bound that the QAOA outputs at logarithmic depth for MaxCUT and Max- q -XORSAT problems. We also provide some numerical evidence that the limitation should be extended to odd q by showing that the OGP exists for the Max-3-XORSAT on random regular graphs.
The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is one of the promising near-term algorithms designed to find approximate solutions for combinatorial optimization problems. The algorithm prepares a parametrized state that is aimed to maximize the expectation value of the objective function of the problem. The circuit for QAOA consists of p layers, and it depends on 2p parameters, the determination of which can be carried out using a variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) subroutine. This is a variational approach for finding optimal parameters, where the quantum state is prepared with a quantum computer, and a classical computer is used for calculating the corresponding objective function value and performing an outer loop optimization routine in order to find optimal parameters. Earlier work on the algorithm has shown that QAOA is closely related to the Quantum Adiabatic Algorithm, which results in noticeable patterns in the optimal parameters. To this purpose, two methods, INTERP and FOURIER, were proposed to exploit this structure by Zhou et al. (2018). In this thesis, I extend upon these results by examining the effectiveness of one of their methods, the INTERP method, on the Max-Cut problem from graph theory. The performance of QAOA using this method was studied on several classes of graphs and benchmarked against the currently best-known classical algorithm Goemans-Williamson, which achieves an approximation ratio of ρ ≈ 0.878 on arbitrary graphs. The classes of graphs examined include cyclic, weighted and unweighted 3-regular, and Erdős–Rényi graphs with edge probabilities of 0.5 and 0.75 and graph sizes ranging from 4 to 16. Moreover, it was investigated if the INTERP method offers an advantage compared to random initialization of parameters and whether or not the method is polynomial in p. It was found that different graph classes lead to similar but different parameter patterns. Furthermore, the performance of QAOA using the INTERP method was dependent on the graph class considered. For the small graphs investigated it was found that QAOA outperforms Goemans-Williamson on ER-0.50, ER-0.75 and weighted 3-regular graphs from p=7 and beyond with respect to how well the expectation of the objective function approximates the optimal value, while for unweighted 3-regular graphs p=6 suffices. However, the calculation of the parameters is costly and requires a number of function evaluations that is on the order of the number of possible bipartitions of small graph with sizes n ≤ 16. Moreover, the numerical results suggested that indeed the method is polynomial in p advocating that the algorithm might be a strong alternative to Goemans-Williamson for large graph sizes, once hardware allows it.
In this work, we analyze the average-case hardness of approximation for the Quantum Hypergraph Max-Cut problem using the theoretical framework of the Quantum Overlap Gap Property (QOGP). We establish two main results. Our first result applies to a wide class of stable quantum algorithms, satisfying a Lipschitz property with respect to the quantum Wasserstein distance of order 222. We show a weak hardness result, demonstrating that for any Lipschitz constant LLL, there is some kkk such that LLL-stable algorithms cannot approximate the optimal solution to Quantum Hypergraph Max-Cut on kkk-uniform hypergraphs in the average case. Additionally, we establish a strong hardness result where kkk is independent of LLL, but only for a more restricted class of local quantum algorithms defined using the quantum Wasserstein distance of order ∞\infty∞. We apply these results to establish concrete depth lower bounds for popular quantum algorithms for preparing near-optimal states for this problem.
The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is designed to run on a gate model quantum computer and has shallow depth. It takes as input a combinatorial optimization problem and outputs a string that satisfies a high fraction of the maximum number of clauses that can be satisfied. For certain problems the lowest depth version of the QAOA has provable performance guarantees although there exist classical algorithms that have better guarantees. Here we argue that beyond its possible computational value the QAOA can exhibit a form of Quantum Supremacy in that, based on reasonable complexity theoretic assumptions, the output distribution of even the lowest depth version cannot be efficiently simulated on any classical device. We contrast this with the case of sampling from the output of a quantum computer running the Quantum Adiabatic Algorithm (QADI) with the restriction that the Hamiltonian that governs the evolution is gapped and stoquastic. Here we show that there is an oracle that would allow sampling from the QADI but even with this oracle, if one could efficiently classically sample from the output of the QAOA, the Polynomial Hierarchy would collapse. This suggests that the QAOA is an excellent candidate to run on near term quantum computers not only because it may be of use for optimization but also because of its potential as a route to establishing quantum supremacy.