Optimal QAOA design for the
Traveling Salesman Problem

Bence Bakó, Adam Glos, Özlem Salehi, Zoltán Zimborás

QAOA

  • Used for combinatorial optimization
  • Natively for gate-based model
  • 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?

Quality measures

  • number of physical qubits
  • effective space size
  • number of gates
  • number of parameterized gates
  • depth
  • depth on LNN
  • energy span

No. qubits and effective space size

XY-QAOA for TSP

mixer: \(X_iX_j + Y_iY_j\)

  • \(n^2\) qubits are needed
  • with good mixer, only one hot states are present (for example \(|001\rangle |010\rangle |001\rangle\))
  • There is only \(n^n\) of them
  • effective space space size is \(\log(n^n) = n\log n\)
  • both lower bouned by log of the number of solutions

No. (parameterized) gates

  • ZZZ applied
  • 5 gates, but 1 parameterized gates
  • The larger number of gates - the more destructive noise
  • number of parameterized gates may influence the cost of estimating analytical gradient.
  • both lower bounded by the number of degrees of freedom in the problem (for example number of possible edges in Max-K-Cut)

\(H = - \sum_{i,j}w_{i,j}Z_i Z_j - \sum_i w_i Z_I\)

Depth (on LNN)

  • we assume parallel computation
  • two cases: all-to-all connectivity and LNN connectivity
  • lowerbounded by number of gates over number of qubits

Energy span

  • Difference between maximal and minimal achievable energy
  • influences the number of measurement required for the energy estimation

From Hoeffding Theorem

Better than the state-of-the-art way for VQE

\(H = - \sum_{i,j}w_{i,j}Z_i Z_j - \sum_i w_i Z_I\)

Minimal example

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

Alternative

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

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

SIM-QAOA

Max-K-Cut

  • Graph as an input
  • \(K\) colors
  • maximize number of edges connecting different colors

Max-K-Cut

  • X-QAOA - X mixer, standard QUBO,
  • XY-QAOA - XY mixer, standard QUBO
  • HOBO - binary encoding, X-mixer
  • Fuchs-QAOA - as in 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.

At least one cost depends siginificantly on K

Fuchs-QAOA

Fuchs-QAOA

Very bad when \(K=2^k+1\)

  • All colors have meaning - last color is multiplied
  • Fix incorrectly assumed different colors

Fuchs-QAOA

Max-K-Cut - SIM-QAOA

  • we start in product of W-like state in a binary encoding
  • quantum version of the classical pseudocode,
  • Dependency on K basically disappeared

Fuchs-QAOA

Was it interesting?

YES

NO

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

TSP

$$ A\sum_{t} \left(\sum_v b_{tv} -1\right)^2 + A\sum_{v} \left(\sum_t b_{tv} -1\right)^2 + B\sum_{t} \sum_{v,w} W_{v,w}b_{t,v}b_{t+1,w}$$

TSP

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

  • ..., but none can! Each red block needs whole information about cost matrix - \(O(n^3)\) gates

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

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)

Thank you!

Soon on arXiv

Copy of SIM-QAOA

By Adam Glos

Copy of SIM-QAOA

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