arXiv subjects

Travis S. Humble

Publications and source records attributed to Travis S. Humble.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Parameter Transfer for Quantum Approximate Optimization of Weighted MaxCut

Finding high-quality parameters is a central obstacle to using the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). Previous work partially addresses this issue for QAOA on unweighted MaxCut problems by leveraging similarities in the objective landscape among different problem instances. However, we show that the more general weighted MaxCut problem has significantly modified objective landscapes, with a proliferation of poor local optima. Our main contribution is a simple rescaling scheme that overcomes these deleterious effects of weights. We show that for a given QAOA depth, a single "typical" vector of QAOA parameters can be successfully transferred to weighted MaxCut instances. This transfer leads to a median decrease in the approximation ratio of only 2.0 percentage points relative to a considerably more expensive direct optimization on a dataset of 34,701 instances with up to 20 nodes and multiple weight distributions. This decrease can be reduced to 1.2 percentage points at the cost of only 10 additional QAOA circuit evaluations with parameters sampled from a pretrained metadistribution, or the transferred parameters can be used as a starting point for a single local optimization run to obtain approximation ratios equivalent to those achieved by exhaustive optimization in $96.35\%$ of our cases.

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arXiv2023

Modeling singlet fission on a quantum computer

We present a use case of practical utility of quantum computing by employing a quantum computer in the investigation of the linear H$_4$ molecule as a simple model to comply with the requirements of singlet fission. We leverage a series of independent strategies to bring down the overall cost of the quantum computations, namely 1) tapering off qubits in order to reduce the size of the relevant Hilbert space; 2) measurement optimization via rotations to eigenbases shared by groups of qubit-wise commuting (QWC) Pauli strings; 3) parallel execution of multiple state preparation + measurement operations, implementing quantum circuits onto all 20 qubits available in the Quantinuum H1-1 quantum hardware. We report results that satisfy the energetic prerequisites of singlet fission and which are in excellent agreement with the exact transition energies (for the chosen one-particle basis), and much superior to classical methods deemed computationally tractable for singlet fission candidates

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arXiv2022

Adaptive channel estimation for mitigating circuits executed on noisy quantum devices

Conventional computers have evolved to device components that demonstrate failure rates of 1e-17 or less, while current quantum computing devices typically exhibit error rates of 1e-2 or greater. This raises concerns about the reliability and reproducibility of the results obtained from quantum computers. The problem is highlighted by experimental observation that today's NISQ devices are inherently unstable. Remote quantum cloud servers typically do not provide users with the ability to calibrate the device themselves. Using inaccurate characterization data for error mitigation can have devastating impact on reproducibility. In this study, we investigate if one can infer the critical channel parameters dynamically from the noisy binary output of the executed quantum circuit and use it to improve program stability. An open question however is how well does this methodology scale. We discuss the efficacy and efficiency of our adaptive algorithm using canonical quantum circuits such as the uniform superposition circuit. Our metric of performance is the Hellinger distance between the post-stabilization observations and the reference (ideal) distribution.

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arXiv2022

Dimensionality reduction with variational encoders based on subsystem purification

Efficient methods for encoding and compression are likely to pave way towards the problem of efficient trainability on higher dimensional Hilbert spaces overcoming issues of barren plateaus. Here we propose an alternative approach to variational autoencoders to reduce the dimensionality of states represented in higher dimensional Hilbert spaces. To this end we build a variational based autoencoder circuit that takes as input a dataset and optimizes the parameters of Parameterized Quantum Circuit (PQC) ansatz to produce an output state that can be represented as tensor product of 2 subsystems by minimizing Tr(ρ^2). The output of this circuit is passed through a series of controlled swap gates and measurements to output a state with half the number of qubits while retaining the features of the starting state, in the same spirit as any dimension reduction technique used in classical algorithms. The output obtained is used for supervised learning to guarantee the working of the encoding procedure thus developed. We make use of Bars and Stripes dataset (BAS) for an 8x8 grid to create efficient encoding states and report a classification accuracy of 95% on the same. Thus the demonstrated example shows a proof for the working of the method in reducing states represented in large Hilbert spaces while maintaining the features required for any further machine learning algorithm that follow.

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arXiv2022

Assessing the Stability of Noisy Quantum Computation

Quantum computation has made considerable progress in the last decade with multiple emerging technologies providing proof-of-principle experimental demonstrations of such calculations. However, these experimental demonstrations of quantum computation face technical challenges due to the noise and errors that arise from imperfect implementation of the technology. Here, we frame the concepts of computational accuracy, result reproducibility, device reliability and program stability in the context of quantum computation. We provide intuitive definitions for these concepts in the context of quantum computation that lead to operationally meaningful bounds on program output. Our assessment highlights the continuing need for statistical analyses of quantum computing program to increase our confidence in the burgeoning field of quantum information science.

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arXiv2022

Snowmass Computational Frontier: Topical Group Report on Quantum Computing

Quantum computing will play a pivotal role in the High Energy Physics (HEP) science program over the early parts of the 21$^{st}$ Century, both as a major expansion of our capabilities across the Computational Frontier, and in synthesis with quantum sensing and quantum networks. This report outlines how Quantum Information Science (QIS) and HEP are deeply intertwined endeavors that benefit enormously from a strong engagement together. Quantum computers do not represent a detour for HEP, rather they are set to become an integral part of our discovery toolkit. Problems ranging from simulating quantum field theories, to fully leveraging the most sensitive sensor suites for new particle searches, and even data analysis will run into limiting bottlenecks if constrained to our current computing paradigms. Easy access to quantum computers is needed to build a deeper understanding of these opportunities. In turn, HEP brings crucial expertise to the national quantum ecosystem in quantum domain knowledge, superconducting technology, cryogenic and fast microelectronics, and massive-scale project management. The role of quantum technologies across the entire economy is expected to grow rapidly over the next decade, so it is important to establish the role of HEP in the efforts surrounding QIS. Fully delivering on the promise of quantum technologies in the HEP science program requires robust support. It is important to both invest in the co-design opportunities afforded by the broader quantum computing ecosystem and leverage HEP strengths with the goal of designing quantum computers tailored to HEP science.

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arXiv2022

Numerical Simulations of Noisy Quantum Circuits for Computational Chemistry

The opportunities afforded by near-term quantum computers to calculate the ground-state properties of small molecules depend on the structure of the computational ansatz as well as the errors induced by device noise. Here we investigate the behavior of these noisy quantum circuits using numerical simulations to estimate the accuracy and fidelity of the prepared quantum states relative to the ground truth obtained by conventional means. We implement several different types of ansatz circuits derived from unitary coupled cluster theory for the purposes of estimating the ground-state energy of Sodium Hydride using the variational quantum eigensolver algorithm. We show how relative error in the energy and the fidelity scale with the levels of gate-based noise, the inter-molecular configuration, the ansatz circuit depth, and the parameter optimization methods.

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arXiv2022

Characterizing the Reproducibility of Noisy Quantum Circuits

The ability of a quantum computer to reproduce or replicate the results of a quantum circuit is a key concern for verifying and validating applications of quantum computing. Statistical variations in circuit outcomes that arise from ill-characterized fluctuations in device noise may lead to computational errors and irreproducible results. While device characterization offers a direct assessment of noise, an outstanding concern is how such metrics bound the reproducibility of a given quantum circuit. Here, we first directly assess the reproducibility of a noisy quantum circuit, in terms of the Hellinger distance between the computational results, and then we show that device characterization offers an analytic bound on the observed variability. We validate the method using an ensemble of single qubit test circuits, executed on a superconducting transmon processor with well-characterized readout and gate error rates. The resulting description for circuit reproducibility, in terms of a composite device parameter, is confirmed to define an upper bound on the observed Hellinger distance, across the variable test circuits. This predictive correlation between circuit outcomes and device characterization offers an efficient method for assessing the reproducibility of noisy quantum circuits.

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arXiv2022

String order melting of spin-1 particle chains in superconducting transmons using optimal control

Utilizing optimal control to simulate a model Hamiltonian is an emerging strategy that leverages the intrinsic physics of a device with digital quantum simulation methods. Here we evaluate optimal control for probing the non-equilibrium properties of symmetry-protected topological (SPT) states simulated with superconducting hardware. Assuming a tunable transmon architecture, we cast evolution of these SPT states as a series of one- and two-site pulse optimization problems that are solved in the presence of leakage constraints. From the generated pulses, we numerical simulate time-dependent melting of the perturbed SPT string order across a six-site model with an average state infidelity of $10^{-3}$. The feasibility of these pulses as well as their efficient application indicate that high-fidelity simulations of string-order melting are within reach of current quantum computing systems.

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arXiv2022

Snowmass White Paper: Quantum Computing Systems and Software for High-energy Physics Research

Quantum computing offers a new paradigm for advancing high-energy physics research by enabling novel methods for representing and reasoning about fundamental quantum mechanical phenomena. Realizing these ideals will require the development of novel computational tools for modeling and simulation, detection and classification, data analysis, and forecasting of high-energy physics (HEP) experiments. While the emerging hardware, software, and applications of quantum computing are exciting opportunities, significant gaps remain in integrating such techniques into the HEP community research programs. Here we identify both the challenges and opportunities for developing quantum computing systems and software to advance HEP discovery science. We describe opportunities for the focused development of algorithms, applications, software, hardware, and infrastructure to support both practical and theoretical applications of quantum computing to HEP problems within the next 10 years.

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arXiv2022

Benchmarking Characterization Methods for Noisy Quantum Circuits

Effective methods for characterizing the noise in quantum computing devices are essential for programming and debugging circuit performance. Existing approaches vary in the information obtained as well as the amount of quantum and classical resources required, with more information generally requiring more resources. Here we benchmark the characterization methods of gate set tomography, Pauli channel noise reconstruction, and empirical direct characterization for developing models that describe noisy quantum circuit performance on a 27-qubit superconducting transmon device. We evaluate these models by comparing the accuracy of noisy circuit simulations with the corresponding experimental observations. We find that the agreement of noise model to experiment does not correlate with the information gained by characterization and that the underlying circuit strongly influences the best choice of characterization approach. Empirical direct characterization scales best of the methods we tested and produced the most accurate characterizations across our benchmarks.

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arXiv2022

Scaling Quantum Approximate Optimization on Near-term Hardware

The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is an approach for near-term quantum computers to potentially demonstrate computational advantage in solving combinatorial optimization problems. However, the viability of the QAOA depends on how its performance and resource requirements scale with problem size and complexity for realistic hardware implementations. Here, we quantify scaling of the expected resource requirements by synthesizing optimized circuits for hardware architectures with varying levels of connectivity. Assuming noisy gate operations, we estimate the number of measurements needed to sample the output of the idealized QAOA circuit with high probability. We show the number of measurements, and hence total time to solution, grows exponentially in problem size and problem graph degree as well as depth of the QAOA ansatz, gate infidelities, and inverse hardware graph degree. These problems may be alleviated by increasing hardware connectivity or by recently proposed modifications to the QAOA that achieve higher performance with fewer circuit layers.

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arXiv2022

Modeling Noisy Quantum Circuits Using Experimental Characterization

Noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices offer unique platforms to test and evaluate the behavior of non-fault-tolerant quantum computing. However, validating programs on NISQ devices is difficult due to fluctuations in the underlying noise sources and other non-reproducible behaviors that generate computational errors. Efficient and effective methods for modeling NISQ behaviors are necessary to debug these devices and develop programming techniques that mitigate against errors. We present a test-driven approach to characterizing NISQ programs that manages the complexity of noisy circuit modeling by decomposing an application-specific circuit into a series of bootstrapped experiments. By characterizing individual subcircuits, we generate a composite model for the original noisy quantum circuit as well as other related programs. We demonstrate this approach using a family of superconducting transmon devices running applications of GHZ-state preparation and the Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm. We measure the model accuracy using the total variation distance between predicted and experimental results, and we find that the composite model works well across multiple circuit instances. In addition, these characterizations are computationally efficient and offer a trade-off in model complexity that can be tailored to the desired predictive accuracy.

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arXiv2021

Quantum Circuit Transformations with a Multi-Level Intermediate Representation Compiler

Quantum computing promises remarkable approaches for processing information, but new tools are needed to compile program representations into the physical instructions required by a quantum computer. Here we present a novel adaptation of the multi-level intermediate representation (MLIR) integrated into a quantum compiler that may be used for checking program execution. We first present how MLIR enables quantum circuit transformations for efficient execution on quantum computing devices and then give an example of compiler transformations based on so-called mirror circuits. We demonstrate that mirror circuits inserted during compilation may test hardware performance by assessing quantum circuit accuracy on several superconducting and ion trap hardware platforms. Our results validate MLIR as an efficient and effective method for collecting hardware-dependent diagnostics through automated transformations of quantum circuits.

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arXiv2021

Efficient Quantum Gate Discovery with Optimal Control

Optimal control theory provides a framework for numerical discovery of device controls that implement quantum logic gates, but common objective functions used for optimization often assign arbitrarily high costs to otherwise useful controls. We propose a framework for designing objective functions that permit novel gate designs such as echo pulses or locally-equivalent gates. We use numerical simulations to demonstrate the efficacy of the new objective functions by designing microwave-only pulses that act as entangling gates for superconducting transmon architectures. We observe that the proposed objective functions lead to higher fidelity controls in fewer optimization iterations than obtainable by traditional objective functions.

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arXiv2021

Multi-angle Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm

The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) generates an approximate solution to combinatorial optimization problems using a variational ansatz circuit defined by parameterized layers of quantum evolution. In theory, the approximation improves with increasing ansatz depth but gate noise and circuit complexity undermine performance in practice. Here, we introduce a multi-angle ansatz for QAOA that reduces circuit depth and improves the approximation ratio by increasing the number of classical parameters. Even though the number of parameters increases, our results indicate that good parameters can be found in polynomial time. This new ansatz gives a 33\% increase in the approximation ratio for an infinite family of MaxCut instances over QAOA. The optimal performance is lower bounded by the conventional ansatz, and we present empirical results for graphs on eight vertices that one layer of the multi-angle anstaz is comparable to three layers of the traditional ansatz on MaxCut problems. Similarly, multi-angle QAOA yields a higher approximation ratio than QAOA at the same depth on a collection of MaxCut instances on fifty and one-hundred vertex graphs. Many of the optimized parameters are found to be zero, so their associated gates can be removed from the circuit, further decreasing the circuit depth. These results indicate that multi-angle QAOA requires shallower circuits to solve problems than QAOA, making it more viable for near-term intermediate-scale quantum devices.

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arXiv2021

Globally optimizing QAOA circuit depth for constrained optimization problems

We develop a global variable substitution method that reduces $n$-variable monomials in combinatorial optimization problems to equivalent instances with monomials in fewer variables. We apply this technique to $3$-SAT and analyze the optimal quantum circuit depth needed to solve the reduced problem using the quantum approximate optimization algorithm. For benchmark $3$-SAT problems, we find that the upper bound of the circuit depth is smaller when the problem is formulated as a product and uses the substitution method to decompose gates than when the problem is written in the linear formulation, which requires no decomposition.

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arXiv2021

Prime Factorization Using Quantum Variational Imaginary Time Evolution

The road to computing on quantum devices has been accelerated by the promises that come from using Shor's algorithm to reduce the complexity of prime factorization. However, this promise hast not yet been realized due to noisy qubits and lack of robust error correction schemes. Here we explore a promising, alternative method for prime factorization that uses well-established techniques from variational imaginary time evolution. We create a Hamiltonian whose ground state encodes the solution to the problem and use variational techniques to evolve a state iteratively towards these prime factors. We show that the number of circuits evaluated in each iteration scales as O(n^{5}d), where n is the bit-length of the number to be factorized and $d$ is the depth of the circuit. We use a single layer of entangling gates to factorize several numbers represented using 7, 8, and 9-qubit Hamiltonians. We also verify the method's performance by implementing it on the IBMQ Lima hardware.

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