Bence Bakó, Adam Glos, Özlem Salehi, Zoltán Zimborás 

Optimal QAOA design for the Traveling Salesman Problem

Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm

  • A mixture of quantum annealing and VQE
  • For gate-based model and combinatorial optimization
  • encodes the problem into the circuit

$$|p,r\rangle = \prod_{i=1}^k \exp(-\mathrm{i} p_iH_{\rm mix})\exp(-\mathrm{i} r_iH) |+^n\rangle $$

  • \(p_i\) and \(r_i\) optimized by external classical procedure
  • Since the problem is encoded into the circuit - how to minimize resources needed?

\(H(t) = (1-t/T) \:H_{\rm mix} + t/T\: H\)

Quality measures

number of physical qubits

effective space size

number of gates

number of parm. gates

depth

depth on LNN

energy span

log(# solutions)

log(# solutions)

# degrees of freedom

# degrees of freedom

# degrees of freedom/log(# solutions)

# degrees of freedom/log(# solutions)

max(obj. value) - min(obj. value)

measures

lower bounds

Max-\(K\)-Cut

Minimal example

  • \(-\prod_{i=1}^n b_i\)
  • Corresponding Ising model: \( -\frac{1}{2^n} \prod_{i=1}^n (1-s_i)\)
  • exponential number of terms \(O(2^n)\)!

\(O(n^2)\) gates on LNN!

\(b_i \leftarrow \frac{1-s_i}{2}\)

SIM-QAOA

This is AND operation!

Was it interesting?

  • we reached optimal quality measures
  • we essentially dropped the dependency on \(K\)
  • fits very well NISQ requirements!
  • very important problem!
  • we essentially took Fuchs idea and have simply chosen better initial state...

Let's go with a harder problem - Travelling Salesman Problem!

YES

NO

Travelling Salesman Problem

\(w_{ij}\)

TSP - redundancy

Time 2

City 3

}

cost

matrix

}

cost

matrix

}

cost

matrix

}

cost

matrix

}

cost

matrix

Travelling Salesman Problem

  • None of the encodings matches the "natural optimal" value, ...

  • ..., but none can! We repeated \(O(n^2)\) degrees of freedom \(n\) times - \(O(n^3)\) gates

MTZ ILP is an exception, as variables are not "time to city" but "city to city"

SIM-QAOA for TSP

  • We start in the superposition of valid cities for each time-point
  • we choose Grover Mixer for our purpose (different ones can be used)
  • Hamiltonian implemented through a quantum version of the classical pseudocode (with some parallelization + swapping strategy)

TSP - SIM-QAOA

TSP - SIM-QAOA

TSP - numerics

GM-QAOA clearly better!

...but at a price

Generalization

The idea can be generalized, so far we managed to use it for

  • Set Cover problem
  • Integer Linear Problem (trade-off)
  • Graph Isomorphism (trade-off in general, optimal for Euclidean graphs)

Very difficult for general graph!

Thank you!

  1. Bärtschi, Andreas, and Stephan Eidenbenz. "Grover mixers for QAOA: Shifting complexity from mixer design to state preparation." 2020 IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE). IEEE, 2020.

  2. Fuchs, Franz G., et al. "Efficient Encoding of the Weighted MAX-\(K\)-CUT on a Quantum Computer Using QAOA." SN Computer Science 2.2 (2021): 1-14.

  3. Glos, Adam, Aleksandra Krawiec, and Zoltán Zimborás. "Space-efficient binary optimization for variational quantum computing." npj Quantum Information 8.1 (2022): 1-8.

  4. Wang, Zhihui, et al. "XY mixers: Analytical and numerical results for the quantum alternating operator ansatz." Physical Review A 101.1 (2020): 012320.

  5. Lucas, Andrew. "Ising formulations of many NP problems." Frontiers in physics (2014): 5.

  6. Farhi, Edward, Jeffrey Goldstone, and Sam Gutmann. "A quantum approximate optimization algorithm." arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.4028 (2014).

simultaneous reduction - short

By Adam Glos

simultaneous reduction - short

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