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The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm and the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick Model at Infinite Size

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arxiv 1910.08187 v4 pith:V6OYBZLT submitted 2019-10-17 quant-ph cond-mat.dis-nncond-mat.stat-mech

The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm and the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick Model at Infinite Size

classification quant-ph cond-mat.dis-nncond-mat.stat-mech
keywords qaoaalgorithmenergymodelquantumapproximateoptimizationperformance
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a general-purpose algorithm for combinatorial optimization problems whose performance can only improve with the number of layers $p$. While QAOA holds promise as an algorithm that can be run on near-term quantum computers, its computational power has not been fully explored. In this work, we study the QAOA applied to the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model, which can be understood as energy minimization of $n$ spins with all-to-all random signed couplings. There is a recent classical algorithm by Montanari that, assuming a widely believed conjecture, can efficiently find an approximate solution for a typical instance of the SK model to within $(1-\epsilon)$ times the ground state energy. We hope to match its performance with the QAOA. Our main result is a novel technique that allows us to evaluate the typical-instance energy of the QAOA applied to the SK model. We produce a formula for the expected value of the energy, as a function of the $2p$ QAOA parameters, in the infinite size limit that can be evaluated on a computer with $O(16^p)$ complexity. We evaluate the formula up to $p=12$, and find that the QAOA at $p=11$ outperforms the standard semidefinite programming algorithm. Moreover, we show concentration: With probability tending to one as $n\to\infty$, measurements of the QAOA will produce strings whose energies concentrate at our calculated value. As an algorithm running on a quantum computer, there is no need to search for optimal parameters on an instance-by-instance basis since we can determine them in advance. What we have here is a new framework for analyzing the QAOA, and our techniques can be of broad interest for evaluating its performance on more general problems where classical algorithms may fail.

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Cited by 9 Pith papers

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

  1. Weak Poincar\'e Inequalities via Approximate Stochastic Localization: Application to Sampling the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick Model

    math.PR 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0

    Approximate stochastic localization plus conductance transfers yield a weak Poincaré inequality for the SK model at β < 1/2, enabling efficient Glauber sampling from a warm start.

  2. SAFE ma-QAOA: Surrogate-Assisted and Fine-Tuning Enhanced Multi-Angle QAOA with Parameter Distillation

    quant-ph 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    SAFE ma-QAOA achieves 64.3% fewer active parameters and 94.5% lower estimated QPU workload via surrogate pre-training and parameter distillation on Sherrington-Kirkpatrick, 2D spin glass, and Max-Cut instances.

  3. Classical State Preparation for Variational Quantum Algorithms via Reinforcement Learning

    quant-ph 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    CRiSP uses neural-guided MCTS and curriculum learning to insert Clifford prefixes before parameterized rotations in VQAs, yielding mean 3.17x and max 45x gains in energy accuracy on 22-qubit QAOA benchmarks versus pri...

  4. The finite-shot help-harm boundary of zero-noise extrapolation

    quant-ph 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Zero-noise extrapolation has a finite-shot help-harm boundary below which it increases local mean-squared error due to variance penalties outweighing bias reduction.

  5. QAOA Parameter Transfer for Hypergraphs

    quant-ph 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Analytical reweighting rules for QAOA parameters on hypergraphs improve performance by adjusting mixing terms beyond previous graph-based methods.

  6. Why Global LLM Leaderboards Are Misleading: Small Portfolios for Heterogeneous Supervised ML

    cs.LG 2026-05 conditional novelty 6.0

    Global Bradley-Terry rankings of LLMs are misleading due to structured heterogeneity in user preferences, and small (λ, ν)-portfolios recover coherent subpopulations that cover over 96% of votes with just five rankings.

  7. Space-Time Tradeoffs of Pauli-Based Computation in Distributed qLDPC Architectures

    quant-ph 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Large qLDPC blocks in distributed quantum computing enable Pauli-based computation to run up to 10x faster than surface codes for optimization algorithms by using spare nodes to bypass serialization bottlenecks.

  8. Evaluating the Limits of QAOA Parameter Transfer at High-Rounds on Sparse Ising Models With Geometrically Local Cubic Terms

    quant-ph 2025-09 conditional novelty 5.0

    Systematic numerical study of QAOA parameter transfer on heavy-hex Ising models with local cubic terms shows transferred angles from small instances yield improving expectation values up to 49 layers on instances up t...

  9. Ground state preparation of random all-to-all Hamiltonians using ADAPT-VQE

    quant-ph 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    TETRIS-ADAPT-VQE achieves fidelities above 99.3% for SYK (N=20) and 99.9998% for SK (L=18) but requires large resources for SYK models.