Fidelity-based Deep Adiabatic Scheduling
Authors: Eli Ovits, Lior Wolf
Venue: ICLR 2021 Spotlight
Abstract: Adiabatic quantum computation is a form of computation that acts by slowly interpolating a quantum system between an easy to prepare initial state and a final state that represents a solution to a given computational problem. The choice of the interpolation schedule is critical to the performance: if at a certain time point, the evolution is too rapid, the system has a high probability to transfer to a higher energy state, which does not represent a solution to the problem. On the other hand, an evolution that is too slow leads to a loss of computation time and increases the probability of failure due to decoherence. In this work, we train deep neural models to produce optimal schedules that are conditioned on the problem at hand.  We consider two types of problem representation: the Hamiltonian form, and the Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) form. A novel loss function that scores schedules according to their approximated success probability is introduced. We benchmark our approach on random QUBO problems, Grover search, 3-SAT, and MAX-CUT problems and show that our approach outperforms, by a sizable margin, the linear schedules as well as alternative approaches that were very recently proposed.