Analyzing the Effectiveness of Quantum Annealing with Meta-Learning

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Hauptverfasser: Pellini, Riccardo, Dacrema, Maurizio Ferrari
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Pellini, Riccardo
Dacrema, Maurizio Ferrari
author_facet Pellini, Riccardo
Dacrema, Maurizio Ferrari
contents The field of Quantum Computing has gathered significant popularity in recent years and a large number of papers have studied its effectiveness in tackling many tasks. We focus in particular on Quantum Annealing (QA), a meta-heuristic solver for Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problems. It is known that the effectiveness of QA is dependent on the task itself, as is the case for classical solvers, but there is not yet a clear understanding of which are the characteristics of a problem that makes it difficult to solve with QA. In this work, we propose a new methodology to study the effectiveness of QA based on meta-learning models. To do so, we first build a dataset composed of more than five thousand instances of ten different optimization problems. We define a set of more than a hundred features to describe their characteristics, and solve them with both QA and three classical solvers. We publish this dataset online for future research. Then, we train multiple meta-models to predict whether QA would solve that instance effectively and use them to probe which are the features with the strongest impact on the effectiveness of QA. Our results indicate that it is possible to accurately predict the effectiveness of QA, validating our methodology. Furthermore, we observe that the distribution of the problem coefficients representing the bias and coupling terms is very informative to identify the probability of finding good solutions, while the density of these coefficients alone is not enough. The methodology we propose allows to open new research directions to further our understanding of the effectiveness of QA, by probing specific dimensions or by developing new QUBO formulations that are better suited for the particular nature of QA. Furthermore, the proposed methodology is flexible and can be extended or used to study other quantum or classical solvers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_00570
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Analyzing the Effectiveness of Quantum Annealing with Meta-Learning
Pellini, Riccardo
Dacrema, Maurizio Ferrari
Quantum Physics
Machine Learning
The field of Quantum Computing has gathered significant popularity in recent years and a large number of papers have studied its effectiveness in tackling many tasks. We focus in particular on Quantum Annealing (QA), a meta-heuristic solver for Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problems. It is known that the effectiveness of QA is dependent on the task itself, as is the case for classical solvers, but there is not yet a clear understanding of which are the characteristics of a problem that makes it difficult to solve with QA. In this work, we propose a new methodology to study the effectiveness of QA based on meta-learning models. To do so, we first build a dataset composed of more than five thousand instances of ten different optimization problems. We define a set of more than a hundred features to describe their characteristics, and solve them with both QA and three classical solvers. We publish this dataset online for future research. Then, we train multiple meta-models to predict whether QA would solve that instance effectively and use them to probe which are the features with the strongest impact on the effectiveness of QA. Our results indicate that it is possible to accurately predict the effectiveness of QA, validating our methodology. Furthermore, we observe that the distribution of the problem coefficients representing the bias and coupling terms is very informative to identify the probability of finding good solutions, while the density of these coefficients alone is not enough. The methodology we propose allows to open new research directions to further our understanding of the effectiveness of QA, by probing specific dimensions or by developing new QUBO formulations that are better suited for the particular nature of QA. Furthermore, the proposed methodology is flexible and can be extended or used to study other quantum or classical solvers.
title Analyzing the Effectiveness of Quantum Annealing with Meta-Learning
topic Quantum Physics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.00570