Addressing the Minor-Embedding Problem in Quantum Annealing and Evaluating State-of-the-Art Algorithm Performance

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Main Authors: Gomez-Tejedor, Aitor, Osaba, Eneko, Villar-Rodriguez, Esther
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Gomez-Tejedor, Aitor
Osaba, Eneko
Villar-Rodriguez, Esther
author_facet Gomez-Tejedor, Aitor
Osaba, Eneko
Villar-Rodriguez, Esther
contents This study addresses the minor-embedding problem, which involves mapping the variables of an Ising model onto a quantum annealing processor. The primary motivation stems from the observed performance disparity of quantum annealers when solving problems suited to the processor's architecture versus those with non-hardware-native topologies. Our research has two main objectives: i) to analyze the impact of embedding quality on the performance of D-Wave Systems quantum annealers, and ii) to evaluate the quality of the embeddings generated by Minorminer, the standard minor-embedding technique in the quantum annealing literature, provided by D-Wave. Regarding the first objective, our experiments reveal a clear correlation between the average chain length of embeddings and the relative errors of the solutions sampled. This underscores the critical influence of embedding quality on quantum annealing performance. For the second objective, we evaluate Minorminer's embedding capabilities, the quality and robustness of its embeddings, and its execution-time performance on Erdös-Rényi graphs. We also compare its performance with Clique Embedding, another algorithm developed by D-Wave, which is deterministic and designed to embed fully connected Ising models into quantum annealing processors, serving as a worst-case scenario. The results demonstrate that there is significant room for improvement for Minorminer, suggesting that more effective embedding strategies could lead to meaningful gains in quantum annealing performance.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_13376
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Addressing the Minor-Embedding Problem in Quantum Annealing and Evaluating State-of-the-Art Algorithm Performance
Gomez-Tejedor, Aitor
Osaba, Eneko
Villar-Rodriguez, Esther
Quantum Physics
Artificial Intelligence
Emerging Technologies
This study addresses the minor-embedding problem, which involves mapping the variables of an Ising model onto a quantum annealing processor. The primary motivation stems from the observed performance disparity of quantum annealers when solving problems suited to the processor's architecture versus those with non-hardware-native topologies. Our research has two main objectives: i) to analyze the impact of embedding quality on the performance of D-Wave Systems quantum annealers, and ii) to evaluate the quality of the embeddings generated by Minorminer, the standard minor-embedding technique in the quantum annealing literature, provided by D-Wave. Regarding the first objective, our experiments reveal a clear correlation between the average chain length of embeddings and the relative errors of the solutions sampled. This underscores the critical influence of embedding quality on quantum annealing performance. For the second objective, we evaluate Minorminer's embedding capabilities, the quality and robustness of its embeddings, and its execution-time performance on Erdös-Rényi graphs. We also compare its performance with Clique Embedding, another algorithm developed by D-Wave, which is deterministic and designed to embed fully connected Ising models into quantum annealing processors, serving as a worst-case scenario. The results demonstrate that there is significant room for improvement for Minorminer, suggesting that more effective embedding strategies could lead to meaningful gains in quantum annealing performance.
title Addressing the Minor-Embedding Problem in Quantum Annealing and Evaluating State-of-the-Art Algorithm Performance
topic Quantum Physics
Artificial Intelligence
Emerging Technologies
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13376