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Main Authors: Atallah, Mostafa, Innan, Nouhaila, Kashif, Muhammad, Shafique, Muhammad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11171
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author Atallah, Mostafa
Innan, Nouhaila
Kashif, Muhammad
Shafique, Muhammad
author_facet Atallah, Mostafa
Innan, Nouhaila
Kashif, Muhammad
Shafique, Muhammad
contents Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) algorithms suffer from barren plateaus, where gradients vanish with system size and circuit depth. Although many mitigation strategies exist, their connection to convergence performance under different iteration budgets remains unclear. Moreover, a systematic analysis identifying which state-of-the-art mitigation techniques perform best under specific scenarios is also lacking. We benchmark four approaches, Local-Global, Adiabatic, State Efficient Ansatz (SEA), and Pretrained VQE, against standard VQE on molecular systems from 4 to 14 qubits, analyzing gradient variance up to 50 layers and convergence over 1000 iterations. Our results show that the impact of gradient preservation is iteration-dependent. In the 14-qubit BeH2 system, Pretrained VQE outperforms SEA at 100 iterations despite lower gradient variance, but SEA becomes 2.2x more accurate at 1000 iterations. For smaller systems, SEA achieves near-exact energies (H2: 10^-5 Ha, LiH: 2x10^-4 Ha) with fidelities 0.999, while standard methods plateau early. The results demonstrate that robust barren plateau mitigation depends on aligning the chosen strategy with both system size and available computational budget, rather than treating gradient variance as the sole predictor of performance.
format Preprint
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Investigating Different Barren Plateaus Mitigation Strategies in Variational Quantum Eigensolver
Atallah, Mostafa
Innan, Nouhaila
Kashif, Muhammad
Shafique, Muhammad
Quantum Physics
Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) algorithms suffer from barren plateaus, where gradients vanish with system size and circuit depth. Although many mitigation strategies exist, their connection to convergence performance under different iteration budgets remains unclear. Moreover, a systematic analysis identifying which state-of-the-art mitigation techniques perform best under specific scenarios is also lacking. We benchmark four approaches, Local-Global, Adiabatic, State Efficient Ansatz (SEA), and Pretrained VQE, against standard VQE on molecular systems from 4 to 14 qubits, analyzing gradient variance up to 50 layers and convergence over 1000 iterations. Our results show that the impact of gradient preservation is iteration-dependent. In the 14-qubit BeH2 system, Pretrained VQE outperforms SEA at 100 iterations despite lower gradient variance, but SEA becomes 2.2x more accurate at 1000 iterations. For smaller systems, SEA achieves near-exact energies (H2: 10^-5 Ha, LiH: 2x10^-4 Ha) with fidelities 0.999, while standard methods plateau early. The results demonstrate that robust barren plateau mitigation depends on aligning the chosen strategy with both system size and available computational budget, rather than treating gradient variance as the sole predictor of performance.
title Investigating Different Barren Plateaus Mitigation Strategies in Variational Quantum Eigensolver
topic Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11171