Fault-tolerant cost of shallow QAOA on near-symmetric optimization problems
Montanaro and Zhou proved that depth-one Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) finds the planted solution of certain near-symmetric constraint satisfaction problems with probability $Ω(1)$, and observed exponential runtimes for general-purpose classical solvers on explicit realizations, providing strong evidence of an empirical exponential speedup of low-depth QAOA. We ask what such a circuit costs fault-tolerantly. Although the cost Hamiltonian carries $Θ(n^\ell)$ clauses, the rotation angle at which QAOA succeeds shrinks as $n^{1-\ell}$, and we show that small-angle Clifford$+T$ rotation synthesis reduces the non-Clifford cost per circuit to $\widetilde O(n^2)$ for every clause locality $\ell$. Compiling the circuit, however, requires the explicit clause list. We find that the mechanism underlying constant QAOA success fixes the degree-one Fourier coefficients of the cost, whose signs reveal the planted solution. However, this leakage need not reveal the solution: we design families in which the quadratic non-Clifford scaling and hard exact optimization coexist.