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Hardware-efficient ansatz without barren plateaus in any depth

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arxiv 2403.04844 v1 pith:IXLVNLMC submitted 2024-03-07 quant-ph cond-mat.stat-mech

Hardware-efficient ansatz without barren plateaus in any depth

classification quant-ph cond-mat.stat-mech
keywords barrenlocalplateausquantumcircuitsansatzcircuitcondition
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Variational quantum circuits have recently gained much interest due to their relevance in real-world applications, such as combinatorial optimizations, quantum simulations, and modeling a probability distribution. Despite their huge potential, the practical usefulness of those circuits beyond tens of qubits is largely questioned. One of the major problems is the so-called barren plateaus phenomenon. Quantum circuits with a random structure often have a flat cost-function landscape and thus cannot be trained efficiently. In this paper, we propose two novel parameter conditions in which the hardware-efficient ansatz (HEA) is free from barren plateaus for arbitrary circuit depths. In the first condition, the HEA approximates to a time-evolution operator generated by a local Hamiltonian. Utilizing a recent result by [Park and Killoran, Quantum 8, 1239 (2024)], we prove a constant lower bound of gradient magnitudes in any depth both for local and global observables. On the other hand, the HEA is within the many-body localized (MBL) phase in the second parameter condition. We argue that the HEA in this phase has a large gradient component for a local observable using a phenomenological model for the MBL system. By initializing the parameters of the HEA using these conditions, we show that our findings offer better overall performance in solving many-body Hamiltonians. Our results indicate that barren plateaus are not an issue when initial parameters are smartly chosen, and other factors, such as local minima or the expressivity of the circuit, are more crucial.

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Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Exponentially many initializations to avoid barren plateaus

    quant-ph 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    A first-moment operator diagnostic reveals exponentially many inequivalent initialization distributions avoid barren plateaus in variational quantum algorithms, with numerics indicating distinct attained minima.

  2. Challenges in Barren Plateau Mitigation with Dynamic Parameterized Quantum Circuits

    quant-ph 2026-06 conditional novelty 6.0

    Adding non-unitary gadgets to variational quantum circuits can create an illusion of trainability — the cost varies, but most parameters remain exponentially hard to train.

  3. Challenges in Barren Plateau Mitigation with Dynamic Parameterized Quantum Circuits

    quant-ph 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Dynamic parameterized quantum circuits still leave a significant fraction of parameters untrainable despite cost anti-concentration, implying BP mitigation via DPQCs is at least as hard as designing BP-free unitaries.

  4. Quantum computation at the edge of chaos

    quant-ph 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Topological entanglement entropy regularizes variational quantum algorithms to enforce quantum sparsity and operate at the edge of chaos for better trainability.

  5. Exploiting biased noise in variational quantum models

    quant-ph 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0

    Twirling amplitude-damping noise into uniform Pauli/depolarising channels reduces expressivity and gradient magnitudes, while preserving the noise bias yields better VQA optimisation in the studied models.

  6. Variational Thermal State Preparation on Digital Quantum Processors Assisted by Matrix Product States

    quant-ph 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A variational framework assisted by matrix product states prepares approximate thermal Gibbs states for 1D lattices up to 30 sites and 2D lattices up to 6x6 using up to 44 qubits, with a demonstration on IBM Heron hardware.

  7. Beyond Logical Circuits: Hardware-Aware Analysis of Expressibility and Trainability in Variational Quantum Algorithms

    quant-ph 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Hardware transpilation of parameterized quantum circuits produces ansatz-dependent shifts in expressibility (up to 125%) and trainability (up to 25%), altering the expected trade-off between them.