Direct phase encoding in QAOA: Describing combinatorial optimization problems through binary decision variables

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Garhofer, Simon, Bringmann, Oliver
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Garhofer, Simon
Bringmann, Oliver
author_facet Garhofer, Simon
Bringmann, Oliver
contents The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) and its derived variants are widely in use for approximating combinatorial optimization problem instances on gate-based Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers. Commonly, circuits required for QAOA are constructed by first reformulating a given problem as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem. It is then straightforward to synthesize a QAOA circuit from QUBO equations. In this work, we illustrate a more qubit-efficient circuit construction for combinatorial optimization problems by the example of the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP). Conventionally, the qubit encoding in QAOA for the TSP describes a tour using a sequence of nodes, where each node is written as a 1-hot binary vector. We propose to encode TSP tours by selecting edges included in the tour. Removing certain redundancies, the number of required qubits can be reduced by a linear factor compared to the aforementioned conventional encoding. We examined implementations of both QAOA encoding variants in terms of their approximation quality and runtime. Our experiments show that for small instances results are just as accurate using our proposed encoding, whereas the number of required classical optimizer iterations increases only slightly.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_07450
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Direct phase encoding in QAOA: Describing combinatorial optimization problems through binary decision variables
Garhofer, Simon
Bringmann, Oliver
Quantum Physics
The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) and its derived variants are widely in use for approximating combinatorial optimization problem instances on gate-based Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers. Commonly, circuits required for QAOA are constructed by first reformulating a given problem as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem. It is then straightforward to synthesize a QAOA circuit from QUBO equations. In this work, we illustrate a more qubit-efficient circuit construction for combinatorial optimization problems by the example of the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP). Conventionally, the qubit encoding in QAOA for the TSP describes a tour using a sequence of nodes, where each node is written as a 1-hot binary vector. We propose to encode TSP tours by selecting edges included in the tour. Removing certain redundancies, the number of required qubits can be reduced by a linear factor compared to the aforementioned conventional encoding. We examined implementations of both QAOA encoding variants in terms of their approximation quality and runtime. Our experiments show that for small instances results are just as accurate using our proposed encoding, whereas the number of required classical optimizer iterations increases only slightly.
title Direct phase encoding in QAOA: Describing combinatorial optimization problems through binary decision variables
topic Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.07450