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A Tutorial on Formulating and Using QUBO Models

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arxiv 1811.11538 v6 pith:KH2544AH submitted 2018-11-13 cs.DS cs.DMmath.OCquant-ph

classification cs.DScs.DMmath.OCquant-ph
keywords qubomodelsmodelquantumcomputingoptimizationclassicalcomputers
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The Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) model has gained prominence in recent years with the discovery that it unifies a rich variety of combinatorial optimization problems. By its association with the Ising problem in physics, the QUBO model has emerged as an underpinning of the quantum computing area known as quantum annealing and has become a subject of study in neuromorphic computing. Through these connections, QUBO models lie at the heart of experimentation carried out with quantum computers developed by D-Wave Systems and neuromorphic computers developed by IBM. Computational experience is being amassed by both the classical and the quantum computing communities that highlights not only the potential of the QUBO model but also its effectiveness as an alternative to traditional modeling and solution methodologies. This tutorial discloses the basic features of the QUBO model that give it the power and flexibility to encompass the range of applications that have thrust it onto center stage of the optimization field. We show how many different types of constraining relationships arising in practice can be embodied within the "unconstrained" QUBO formulation in a very natural manner using penalty functions, yielding exact model representations in contrast to the approximate representations produced by customary uses of penalty functions. Each step of generating such models is illustrated in detail by simple numerical examples, to highlight the convenience of using QUBO models in numerous settings. We also describe recent innovations for solving QUBO models that offer a fertile avenue for integrating classical and quantum computing and for applying these models in machine learning.

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Cited by 32 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. OpenAlex reports about 177 citations worldwide. Full citation record

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  2. Reducing QAOA Circuit Depth by Factoring out Semi-Symmetries

    quant-ph 2024-11 reject novelty 7.0 of 10

    A QUBO preprocessing algorithm factors out partial coupling symmetries into ancilla qubits, reducing QAOA CNOT count and circuit depth while preserving the ground state energy.

  3. Dynamical Lie Algebras Cannot Describe Shallow QAOA: Cragged Terrains, Barren Plateaus, and Empirical Hardness Models

    quant-ph 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    For shallow QAOA on maximum independent set, loss landscape variance increases with system size instead of vanishing, contradicting dynamical Lie algebra predictions.

  4. A Geometric Theory of Fermion-to-Qubit Encodings

    quant-ph 2026-07 reject novelty 6.0 of 10

    The paper proposes that Bravyi–Kitaev and Xia–Bian–Kais encoded Hamiltonians carry geometric structure whose spectral and transport descriptors reflect interaction-driven reorganization, but the strongest "exact" clai...

  5. Thermodynamic significance of QUBO encoding on quantum annealers

    quant-ph 2026-01 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Penalty weights in a QUBO encoding act as thermodynamic control knobs, changing both solver success and irreversibility on a quantum annealer.

  6. QAOA-GPT: Efficient Generation of Adaptive and Regular Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm Circuits

    quant-ph 2025-04 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A transformer trained on ADAPT-QAOA solutions can generate valid QAOA circuits for unseen MaxCut instances, matching ADAPT-QAOA approximation ratios within about 0.005 while avoiding iterative parameter optimization.

  7. Transfer of Knowledge through Reverse Annealing: A Preliminary Analysis of the Benefits and What to Share

    quant-ph 2025-01 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Reverse annealing benefits from reusing solutions of similar knapsack instances, and Hamming distance to the target solution predicts success better than energy difference.

  8. Quest for quantum advantage: Monte Carlo wave-function simulations of the Coherent Ising Machine

    quant-ph 2025-01 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Simulations of small Coherent Ising Machines suggest non-classical initial states and time-varying couplings can improve ground-state search success, but the effect is not separated from a classical amplitude advantage.

  9. Reducing QUBO Density by Factoring Out Semi-Symmetries

    quant-ph 2024-12 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Semi-symmetries in QUBO matrices can be factored into ancilla qubits, reducing couplings and QAOA depth by up to 45% while preserving the ground state if the anchoring parameter is large enough.

  10. Optimizing Sensor Redundancy in Sequential Decision-Making Problems

    cs.RO 2024-12 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    SensorOpt formulates backup sensor selection for RL policies as a budget-constrained QUBO using a second-order return approximation, and finds near-optimal configurations with Tabu Search.

  11. Quantum Isomer Search

    quant-ph 2019-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A quantum annealer enumerated all structural isomers of alkanes up to nine carbons by solving a QUBO problem, with a claimed linear scaling in sampling time.

  12. COMET: Combinatorial Optimization for Multiplex Editing Targets Via Constraint-Preserving QAOA

    quant-ph 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.5 of 10

    On a three-gene CRISPR gRNA selection QUBO, XY-mixer QAOA reaches >95% optimum probability by depth 3 in simulation and keeps sim–hardware energy gap within |0.8| on ibm_kingston, while penalty variants stay below 6% ...

  13. Principles of Quantum Optimization for Constrained Problems

    quant-ph 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Computational slowdown in constrained quantum optimization is attributed to the speed of entanglement restructuring, and the paper shows how constraints create (or avoid) the narrow spectral gaps where this restructur...

  14. Enhancing Satellite Quantum Key Distribution with Dual Band Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

    eess.SP 2025-07 reject novelty 5.0 of 10

    The paper argues that a dual-band RIS can jointly reduce QBER and increase SNR in satellite QKD plus RF links, but the quantitative claims in the abstract conflict with the figures and tables.

  15. Towards secondary structure prediction of longer mRNA sequences using a quantum-centric optimization scheme

    quant-ph 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Hybrid CVaR and IQP quantum workflows find CPLEX-verified optimal solutions for mRNA-folding QUBO instances up to 156 qubits, but simulated scaling shows steeply declining success rates.

  16. QCaMP: A 4-Week Summer Camp Introducing High School Students to Quantum Information Science and Technology

    physics.ed-ph 2025-04 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

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  17. Feasibility-Preserving Quantum Search for Constrained Transportation Routing

    quant-ph 2026-08 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    A column-wise swap mixer for QAOA-based TSP and VRP is proposed, but its claimed feasibility guarantee is contradicted by the paper's own inter-vehicle swap equations.

  18. A Distributed Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm For Unit Commitment

    cs.DC 2026-08 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    A 15-variable unit commitment case shows that brute-force enumeration, monolithic QAOA, and distributed QAOA inside ADMM all recover the same optimal commitment schedule and cost.

  19. EPIC-CIM: Training Convolutional Neural Networks on a Coherent Ising Machine via Equilibrium Propagation

    quant-ph 2026-07 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    An energy-based CIM training scheme with equilibrium propagation reportedly reaches 92.3% MNIST test accuracy, but lacks a valid derivation and reproducible details.

  20. Quantum Approximate and Quantum Walk Optimization Approaches to Set Balancing

    quant-ph 2025-09 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    QAOA and QWOA are applied to set balancing via an L2 QUBO formulation, and a scaled-exponential Pauli-string mixer decomposition is claimed to outperform conventional circuits, but the benchmark evidence is not reproducible.

  21. Quantum-based QoE Optimization in Advanced Cellular Networks: Integration and Cloud Gaming Use Case

    cs.NI 2025-08 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    Quantum-inspired regressors match classical ML for cloud gaming KQI prediction on a controlled testbed, and a tensor-network optimizer matches brute-force with a modest speedup.

  22. A comprehensive benchmark of an Ising machine on the Max-Cut problem

    quant-ph 2025-07 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    The Digital Annealer finds better Max-Cut solutions than selected classical heuristics on a majority of medium-to-large instances, but its advantage depends on instance size and numeric precision.

  23. Beyond Ground States: Physics-Inspired Optimization of Excited States of Classical Hamiltonians

    quant-ph 2025-07 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    ExcLQA, a penalty-based extension of local quantum annealing, finds excited states of Ising models and solves small instances of the shortest vector problem up to rank 46.

  24. Quantum-Assisted Space Logistics Mission Planning

    math.OC 2025-01 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    A 7-node space logistics routing problem was encoded as a QUBO-style Hamiltonian and solved on QCi's Dirac-3 entropy quantum computer, producing a feasible but admitted-suboptimal plan.

  25. Sphere Packing on a Quantum Computer for Chromatography Modeling

    quant-ph 2024-11 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    A proof-of-concept that maps circle packing for chromatography to a maximum independent set problem and runs QAOA on 18 qubits, with resource estimates for harder sphere packing variants.

  26. Quantum Annealing based Hybrid Strategies for Real Time Route Optimization

    quant-ph 2024-11 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    H2S and H3S, two fuzzy-clustering plus quantum-annealing hybrids, achieve 8-19 percent optimality gaps on five small VRPLib instances, with H3S favored on corner-depot instances and H2S on center-depot instances.

  27. A Resource-Efficient Quantum Framework for Graph Coloring and Chromatic Number Estimation

    quant-ph 2026-08 reject novelty 3.0 of 10

    A quantum graph-coloring framework with log-color encoding and a QFT-based mixer is presented; its chromatic-number term is flawed because label-sum minimization does not imply color-count minimization.

  28. Feedback-Based Quantum Control for Safe and Synergistic Drug Combination Design

    quant-ph 2026-01 conditional novelty 3.0 of 10

    A quantum feedback algorithm finds ground-state drug combinations from Ising-encoded interaction data, but the problems are tiny and the interaction weights are hand-assigned.

  29. Performance Analysis of Convolutional Neural Network By Applying Unconstrained Binary Quadratic Programming

    cs.LG 2025-05 reject novelty 3.0 of 10

    A hybrid QUBO/quantum-annealing optimizer is claimed to improve CNN training on MNIST, but the supporting derivation and experiments are inconsistent.

  30. Programming guide for solving constraint satisfaction problems with tensor networks

    physics.comp-ph 2024-12 conditional novelty 3.0 of 10

    This guide demonstrates how to use the Julia packages GenericTensorNetworks.jl, OMEinsum.jl, and ProblemReductions.jl to represent constraint satisfaction problems as tensor networks, optimize contraction orders, and ...

  31. QUBO Refinement: Achieving Superior Precision through Iterative Quantum Formulation with Limited Qubits

    quant-ph 2024-11 reject novelty 3.0 of 10

    An iterative bit-slicing QUBO refinement method claims 16-decimal precision for linear systems but demonstrates only 1e-13 error and lacks a proven convergence guarantee.

  32. Quantum Computing for Energy Management: A Semi Non-Technical Guide for Practitioners

    quant-ph 2024-11 unverdicted novelty 2.0 of 10

    A review-based guide concludes that quantum speedup for energy management is unproven and presents a practical framework for selecting quantum and quantum-inspired approaches.

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