arXiv subjects

Naeimeh Mohseni

Publications and source records attributed to Naeimeh Mohseni.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Constrained Quantum Optimization at Utility Scale: Application to the Knapsack Problem

Constrained combinatorial optimization problems are challenging for quantum computing, particularly at utility-relevant scales and on near-term hardware. At the same time, these problems are of practical significance in industry; for example, the Unit Commitment (UC) problem in energy systems involves complex operational constraints. To address this challenge, we apply copula-QAOA (cop-QAOA), a hardware-efficient approach for constrained optimization to a single-period UC that can be reduced to a one-dimensional knapsack. Cop-QAOA biases the quantum state toward feasible solutions using constant-depth mixers and appropriately biased initial states. We implement our benchmark on problem instances that are confirmed to be hard for classical solvers such as Gurobi. Our results show that cop-QAOA often finds solutions better than a lazy greedy baseline and very close to, and in some instances surpasses, those obtained by Gurobi, with only a few QAOA rounds. This work presents the largest successful demonstration of the knapsack problem on IBM Quantum hardware using up to 150 qubits, and more generally, the largest demonstration of constrained combinatorial optimization where constraints are enforced via shallow mixers.

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arXiv2025

Hierarchical divide and conquer quantum approach to combinatorial optimization problems with tunable reduction

Combinatorial optimization is considered a promising class of problems in which quantum computers can show significant advantages. However, problems of practical relevance typically have more variables than current or foreseeable quantum computers have qubits. Here we introduce a divide and conquer approach that partitions the optimization problem into subgraphs that can be represented on smaller quantum processors. We then find all states of the subgraphs that can possibly be part of the solution to the entire problem by determining the cost or energy ranges in which the local subgraph energies of these states must be contained. This allows us to reduce the problem by only considering the subspace spanned by these states. We then recombine the system using a binary encoding for each subgraph with a local energy ordering. This process can be iterated until no further reduction is possible. We also find that the number of necessary qubits can be reduced further when only retaining states in a fraction of the relevant energy range at very little expense in terms of approximation ratio to the global ground state. In numerical simulations, we find that our approach allows us to solve combinatorial optimization problems on weighted random 3-regular graphs with $|\mathcal{V}|=40$ discrete variables on $\sim |\mathcal{V}| / 4$ qubits while retaining a possible approximation ratio of $\sim99.9\%$. We also observe an increasing reduction with larger system sizes.

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arXiv2025

Boosting Sparsity in Graph Decompositions with QAOA Sampling

We study the problem of decomposing a graph into a weighted sum of a small number of matchings, a task that arises in network resource allocation problems such as peer-to-peer energy exchange. Computing such decompositions is challenging for classical algorithms, even for small instances. To address this problem, we propose E-FCFW, a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm based on the Fully-Corrective Frank-Wolfe (FCFW) algorithm that incorporates a matching-sampling subroutine. We design a QAOA version of this subroutine and benchmark it against classical approaches (random sampling and simulated annealing) on demand graphs derived from complete, bipartite, and heavy-hex topologies. The quantum subroutine is executed using the Qiskit Aer state-vector and MPS simulators and on IBM Kingston hardware (7-111 qubits). On complete and bipartite graphs with 6-10 nodes, E-FCFW with QAOA yields consistently sparser decompositions than the classical baselines, and even beats the best-known solution for one instance. On heavy-hex graphs with 50, 70 and 100 nodes, E-FCFW with QAOA outperforms the other methods in terms of approximation error, demonstrating performance on utility-scale quantum hardware. For the largest graphs (100 nodes) E-FCFW with QAOA performs much better when using MPS circuit simulation, compared to using quantum hardware. This indicates that at this scale, the performance is severely impacted by hardware noise.

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arXiv2025

Demonstrating Quantum Scaling Advantage in Approximate Optimization for Energy Coalition Formation with 100+ Agents

The formation of energy communities is pivotal for advancing decentralized and sustainable energy management. Within this context, Coalition Structure Generation (CSG) emerges as a promising framework. The complexity of CSG grows rapidly with the number of agents, making classical solvers impractical for even moderate sizes. This suggests CSG as an ideal candidate for benchmarking quantum algorithms against classical ones. Facing ongoing challenges in attaining computational quantum advantage for exact optimization, we pivot our focus to benchmarking quantum and classical solvers for approximate optimization. Approximate optimization is particularly critical for industrial use cases requiring real-time optimization, where finding high-quality solutions quickly is often more valuable than achieving exact solutions more slowly. Our findings indicate that quantum annealing (QA) on DWave can achieve solutions of comparable quality to our best classical solver, but with more favorable runtime scaling, showcasing an advantage. This advantage is observed when compared to solvers, such as Tabu search, simulated annealing, and the state-of-the-art solver Gurobi, in finding approximate solutions for energy community formation involving over 100 agents. DWave also surpasses 1-round QAOA on IBM hardware. Our findings represent the largest benchmark of quantum approximate optimizations for a real-world dense model beyond the hardware's native topology, where D-Wave demonstrates a scaling advantage.

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arXiv2025

Quantum Optimization Benchmarking Library - The Intractable Decathlon

Through recent progress in hardware development, quantum computers have advanced to the point where benchmarking of (heuristic) quantum algorithms at scale is within reach. Particularly in combinatorial optimization - where most algorithms are heuristics - it is key to empirically analyze their performance on hardware and track progress towards quantum advantage. To this extent, we present ten optimization problem classes that are difficult for existing classical algorithms and can (mostly) be linked to practically relevant applications, with the goal to enable systematic, fair, and comparable benchmarks for quantum optimization methods. Further, we introduce the Quantum Optimization Benchmarking Library (QOBLIB) where the problem instances and solution track records can be found. The individual properties of the problem classes vary in terms of objective and variable type, coefficient ranges, and density. Crucially, they all become challenging for established classical methods already at system sizes ranging from less than 100 to, at most, an order of 100,000 decision variables, allowing to approach them with today's quantum computers. We reference the results from state-of-the-art solvers for instances from all problem classes and demonstrate exemplary baseline results obtained with quantum solvers for selected problems. The baseline results illustrate a standardized form to present benchmarking solutions, which has been designed to ensure comparability of the used methods, reproducibility of the respective results, and trackability of algorithmic and hardware improvements over time. We encourage the optimization community to explore the performance of available classical or quantum algorithms and hardware platforms with the benchmarking problem instances presented in this work toward demonstrating quantum advantage in optimization.

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arXiv2024

Mitigating exponential concentration in covariant quantum kernels for subspace and real-world data

Fidelity quantum kernels have shown promise in classification tasks, particularly when a group structure in the data can be identified and exploited through a covariant feature map. In fact, there exist classification problems on which covariant kernels provide a provable advantage, thus establishing a separation between quantum and classical learners. However, their practical application poses two challenges: on one side, the group structure may be unknown and approximate in real-world data, and on the other side, scaling to the `utility' regime (above 100 qubits) is affected by exponential concentration. In this work, we address said challenges by applying fidelity kernels to real-world data with unknown structure, related to the scheduling of a fleet of electric vehicles, and to synthetic data generated from the union of subspaces, which is then close to many relevant real-world datasets. Furthermore, we propose a novel error mitigation strategy specifically tailored for fidelity kernels, called Bit Flip Tolerance (BFT), to alleviate the exponential concentration in our utility-scale experiments. Our multiclass classification reaches accuracies comparable to classical SVCs up to 156 qubits, thus constituting the largest experimental demonstration of quantum machine learning on IBM devices to date. For the real-world data experiments, the effect of the proposed BFT becomes manifest on 40+ qubits, where mitigated accuracies reach 80%, in line with classical, compared to 33% without BFT. Through the union-of-subspace synthetic dataset with 156 qubits, we demonstrate a mitigated accuracy of 80%, compared to 83% of classical models, and 37% of unmitigated quantum, using a test set of limited size.

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arXiv2024

Challenges and Opportunities in Quantum Optimization

Recent advances in quantum computers are demonstrating the ability to solve problems at a scale beyond brute force classical simulation. As such, a widespread interest in quantum algorithms has developed in many areas, with optimization being one of the most pronounced domains. Across computer science and physics, there are a number of different approaches for major classes of optimization problems, such as combinatorial optimization, convex optimization, non-convex optimization, and stochastic extensions. This work draws on multiple approaches to study quantum optimization. Provably exact versus heuristic settings are first explained using computational complexity theory - highlighting where quantum advantage is possible in each context. Then, the core building blocks for quantum optimization algorithms are outlined to subsequently define prominent problem classes and identify key open questions that, if answered, will advance the field. The effects of scaling relevant problems on noisy quantum devices are also outlined in detail, alongside meaningful benchmarking problems. We underscore the importance of benchmarking by proposing clear metrics to conduct appropriate comparisons with classical optimization techniques. Lastly, we highlight two domains - finance and sustainability - as rich sources of optimization problems that could be used to benchmark, and eventually validate, the potential real-world impact of quantum optimization.

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arXiv2024

Evaluating Quantum Optimization for Dynamic Self-Reliant Community Detection

Power grid partitioning is an important requirement for resilient distribution grids. Since electricity production is progressively shifted to the distribution side, dynamic identification of self-reliant grid subsets becomes crucial for operation. This problem can be represented as a modification to the well-known NP-hard Community Detection (CD) problem. We formulate it as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem suitable for solving using quantum computation{\color{blue}, which is expected to find better-quality partitions faster. The formulation aims to find communities with maximal self-sufficiency and minimal power flowing between them}. To assess quantum optimization for sizeable problems, we apply a hierarchical divisive method that solves sub-problem QUBOs to perform grid bisections. Furthermore, we propose a customization of the Louvain heuristic that includes self-reliance. In the evaluation, we first demonstrate that this problem examines exponential runtime scaling classically. Then, using different IEEE power system test cases, we benchmark the solution quality for multiple approaches: D-Wave's hybrid quantum-classical solvers, classical heuristics, and a branch-and-bound solver. As a result, we observe that the hybrid solvers provide very promising results, both with and without the divisive algorithm, regarding solution quality achieved within a given time frame. Directly utilizing D-Wave's Quantum Annealing (QA) hardware shows inferior partitioning.

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arXiv2024

Towards Less Greedy Quantum Coalition Structure Generation in Induced Subgraph Games

The transition to 100% renewable energy requires new techniques for managing energy networks, such as dividing them into sensible subsets of prosumers called micro-grids. Doing so in an optimal manner is a difficult optimization problem, as it can be abstracted to the Coalition Structure Generation problem in Induced Subgraph Games, a NP-complete problem which requires dividing an undirected, complete, weighted graph into subgraphs in a way that maximizes the sum of their internal weights. Recently, Venkatesh et al. (arXiv:2212.11372) published a Quantum Annealing (QA)-based iterative algorithm called GCS-Q, which they claim to be the best currently existing solver for the problem in terms of runtime complexity. As this algorithm makes the application of QA to the problem seem promising, but is a greedy one, this work proposes several less greedy QA-based approaches and investigates whether any of them can outperform GCS-Q in terms of solution quality. While we find that this is not the case yet on D-Wave hardware, most of them do when using the classical QBSolv software as a solver. Especially an algorithm we call 4-split iterative R-QUBO shows potential here, finding all optima in our dataset while scaling favorably with the problem size in terms of runtime. Thus, it appears to be interesting for future research on quantum approaches to the problem, assuming QA hardware will become more noise-resilient over time.

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arXiv2024

A Machine Learning Approach to Boost the Vehicle-2-Grid Scheduling

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are emerging as battery energy storage systems (BESSs) of increasing importance for different power grid services. However, the unique characteristics of EVs makes them more difficult to operate than dedicated BESSs. In this work, we apply a data-driven learning approach to leverage EVs as a BESS to provide capacity-related services to the grid. The approach uses machine learning to predict how to charge and discharge EVs while satisfying their operational constraints. As a paradigm application, we use flexible energy commercialization in the wholesale markets, but the approach can be applied to a broader range of capacity-related grid services. We evaluate the proposed approach numerically and show that when the number of EVs is large, we can obtain comparable objective values to CPLEX and approximate dynamic programming, but with shorter run times. These reduced run times are important because they allow us to (re)optimize frequently to adapt to the time-varying system conditions.

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arXiv2024

Deep learning of many-body observables and quantum information scrambling

Machine learning has shown significant breakthroughs in quantum science, where in particular deep neural networks exhibited remarkable power in modeling quantum many-body systems. Here, we explore how the capacity of data-driven deep neural networks in learning the dynamics of physical observables is correlated with the scrambling of quantum information. We train a neural network to find a mapping from the parameters of a model to the evolution of observables in random quantum circuits for various regimes of quantum scrambling and test its \textit{generalization} and \textit{extrapolation} capabilities in applying it to unseen circuits. Our results show that a particular type of recurrent neural network is extremely powerful in generalizing its predictions within the system size and time window that it has been trained on for both, localized and scrambled regimes. These include regimes where classical learning approaches are known to fail in sampling from a representation of the full wave function. Moreover, the considered neural network succeeds in \textit{extrapolating} its predictions beyond the time window and system size that it has been trained on for models that show localization, but not in scrambled regimes.

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arXiv2024

Transfer learning in predicting quantum many-body dynamics: from physical observables to entanglement entropy

Deep neural networks have demonstrated remarkable efficacy in extracting meaningful representations from complex datasets. This has propelled representation learning as a compelling area of research across diverse fields. One interesting open question is how beneficial representation learning can be for quantum many-body physics, with its notouriosly high-dimensional state space. In this work, we showcase the capacity of a neural network that was trained on a subset of physical observables of a many-body system to partially acquire an implicit representation of the wave function. We illustrate this by demonstrating the effectiveness of reusing the representation learned by the neural network to enhance the learning process of another quantity derived from the quantum state. In particular, we focus on how the pre-trained neural network can enhance the learning of entanglement entropy. This is of particular interest as directly measuring the entanglement in a many-body system is very challenging, while a subset of physical observables can be easily measured in experiments. We show the pre-trained neural network learns the dynamics of entropy with fewer resources and higher precision in comparison with direct training on the entanglement entropy.

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arXiv2024

Quantum Optimization for the Future Energy Grid: Summary and Quantum Utility Prospects

In this project summary paper, we summarize the key results and use-cases explored in the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) funded project "Q-GRID" which aims to assess potential quantum utility optimization applications in the electrical grid. The project focuses on two layers of optimization problems relevant to decentralized energy generation and transmission as well as novel energy transportation/exchange methods such as Peer-2-Peer energy trading and microgrid formation. For select energy grid optimization problems, we demonstrate exponential classical optimizer runtime scaling even for small problem instances, and present initial findings that variational quantum algorithms such as QAOA and hybrid quantum annealing solvers may provide more favourable runtime scaling to obtain similar solution quality. These initial results suggest that quantum computing may be a key enabling technology in the future energy transition insofar that they may be able to solve business problems which are already challenging at small problem instance sizes.

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arXiv2023

Deep recurrent networks predicting the gap evolution in adiabatic quantum computing

In adiabatic quantum computing finding the dependence of the gap of the Hamiltonian as a function of the parameter varied during the adiabatic sweep is crucial in order to optimize the speed of the computation. Inspired by this challenge, in this work, we explore the potential of deep learning for discovering a mapping from the parameters that fully identify a problem Hamiltonian to the aforementioned parametric dependence of the gap applying different network architectures. Through this example, we conjecture that a limiting factor for the learnability of such problems is the size of the input, that is, how the number of parameters needed to identify the Hamiltonian scales with the system size. We show that a long short-term memory network succeeds in predicting the gap when the parameter space scales linearly with system size. Remarkably, we show that once this architecture is combined with a convolutional neural network to deal with the spatial structure of the model, the gap evolution can even be predicted for system sizes larger than the ones seen by the neural network during training. This provides a significant speedup in comparison with the existing exact and approximate algorithms in calculating the gap.

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arXiv2022

Deep Learning of Quantum Many-Body Dynamics via Random Driving

Neural networks have emerged as a powerful way to approach many practical problems in quantum physics. In this work, we illustrate the power of deep learning to predict the dynamics of a quantum many-body system, where the training is \textit{based purely on monitoring expectation values of observables under random driving}. The trained recurrent network is able to produce accurate predictions for driving trajectories entirely different than those observed during training. As a proof of principle, here we train the network on numerical data generated from spin models, showing that it can learn the dynamics of observables of interest without needing information about the full quantum state. This allows our approach to be applied eventually to actual experimental data generated from a quantum many-body system that might be open, noisy, or disordered, without any need for a detailed understanding of the system. This scheme provides considerable speedup for rapid explorations and pulse optimization. Remarkably, we show the network is able to extrapolate the dynamics to times longer than those it has been trained on, as well as to the infinite-system-size limit.

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arXiv2022

Ising machines as hardware solvers of combinatorial optimization problems

Ising machines are hardware solvers which aim to find the absolute or approximate ground states of the Ising model. The Ising model is of fundamental computational interest because it is possible to formulate any problem in the complexity class NP as an Ising problem with only polynomial overhead. A scalable Ising machine that outperforms existing standard digital computers could have a huge impact for practical applications for a wide variety of optimization problems. In this review, we survey the current status of various approaches to constructing Ising machines and explain their underlying operational principles. The types of Ising machines considered here include classical thermal annealers based on technologies such as spintronics, optics, memristors, and digital hardware accelerators; dynamical-systems solvers implemented with optics and electronics; and superconducting-circuit quantum annealers. We compare and contrast their performance using standard metrics such as the ground-state success probability and time-to-solution, give their scaling relations with problem size, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses.

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arXiv2021

Error suppression in adiabatic quantum computing with qubit ensembles

Incorporating protection against quantum errors into adiabatic quantum computing (AQC) is an important task due to the inevitable presence of decoherence. Here we investigate an error-protected encoding of the AQC Hamiltonian, where qubit ensembles are used in place of qubits. Our Hamiltonian only involves total spin operators of the ensembles, offering a simpler route towards error-corrected quantum computing. Our scheme is particularly suited to neutral atomic gases where it is possible to realize large ensemble sizes and produce ensemble-ensemble entanglement. We identify a critical ensemble size $N_{\mathrm{c}}$ where the nature of the first excited state becomes a single particle perturbation of the ground state, and the gap energy is predictable by mean-field theory. For ensemble sizes larger than $N_{\mathrm{c}}$, the ground state becomes protected due to the presence of logically equivalent states and the AQC performance improves with $N$, as long as the decoherence rate is sufficiently low.

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arXiv2018

Deterministic generation of hybrid high-N00N states with Rydberg ions trapped in microwave cavities

Trapped ions are among the most promising platforms for quantum technologies. They are at the heart of the most precise clocks and sensors developed to date, which exploit the quantum coherence of a single electronic or motional degree of freedom of an ion. However, future high precision quantum metrology will require the use of entangled states of several degrees of freedom. Here we propose a protocol capable of generating high N00N states where the entanglement is shared between the motion of a trapped ion and an electromagnetic cavity mode, a so called hybrid configuration. We prove the feasibility of the proposal in a platform consisting of a trapped ion excited to its circular Rydberg state manifold, coupled to the modes of a high Q microwave cavity. This compact hybrid architecture has the advantage that it can couple to signals of very different nature, which modify either the ions motion or the cavity modes. Moreover, the exact same setup can be used right after the state preparation phase to implement the interferometer required for quantum metrology.

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