11,221 research outputs found
Adiabatic evolution on a spatial-photonic Ising machine
Combinatorial optimization problems are crucial for widespread applications
but remain difficult to solve on a large scale with conventional hardware.
Novel optical platforms, known as coherent or photonic Ising machines, are
attracting considerable attention as accelerators on optimization tasks
formulable as Ising models. Annealing is a well-known technique based on
adiabatic evolution for finding optimal solutions in classical and quantum
systems made by atoms, electrons, or photons. Although various Ising machines
employ annealing in some form, adiabatic computing on optical settings has been
only partially investigated. Here, we realize the adiabatic evolution of
frustrated Ising models with 100 spins programmed by spatial light modulation.
We use holographic and optical control to change the spin couplings
adiabatically, and exploit experimental noise to explore the energy landscape.
Annealing enhances the convergence to the Ising ground state and allows to find
the problem solution with probability close to unity. Our results demonstrate a
photonic scheme for combinatorial optimization in analogy with adiabatic
quantum algorithms and enforced by optical vector-matrix multiplications and
scalable photonic technology.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure
Quantum-Assisted Learning of Hardware-Embedded Probabilistic Graphical Models
Mainstream machine-learning techniques such as deep learning and
probabilistic programming rely heavily on sampling from generally intractable
probability distributions. There is increasing interest in the potential
advantages of using quantum computing technologies as sampling engines to speed
up these tasks or to make them more effective. However, some pressing
challenges in state-of-the-art quantum annealers have to be overcome before we
can assess their actual performance. The sparse connectivity, resulting from
the local interaction between quantum bits in physical hardware
implementations, is considered the most severe limitation to the quality of
constructing powerful generative unsupervised machine-learning models. Here we
use embedding techniques to add redundancy to data sets, allowing us to
increase the modeling capacity of quantum annealers. We illustrate our findings
by training hardware-embedded graphical models on a binarized data set of
handwritten digits and two synthetic data sets in experiments with up to 940
quantum bits. Our model can be trained in quantum hardware without full
knowledge of the effective parameters specifying the corresponding quantum
Gibbs-like distribution; therefore, this approach avoids the need to infer the
effective temperature at each iteration, speeding up learning; it also
mitigates the effect of noise in the control parameters, making it robust to
deviations from the reference Gibbs distribution. Our approach demonstrates the
feasibility of using quantum annealers for implementing generative models, and
it provides a suitable framework for benchmarking these quantum technologies on
machine-learning-related tasks.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures. Minor further revisions. As published in Phys.
Rev.
Natural evolution strategies and variational Monte Carlo
A notion of quantum natural evolution strategies is introduced, which
provides a geometric synthesis of a number of known quantum/classical
algorithms for performing classical black-box optimization. Recent work of
Gomes et al. [2019] on heuristic combinatorial optimization using neural
quantum states is pedagogically reviewed in this context, emphasizing the
connection with natural evolution strategies. The algorithmic framework is
illustrated for approximate combinatorial optimization problems, and a
systematic strategy is found for improving the approximation ratios. In
particular it is found that natural evolution strategies can achieve
approximation ratios competitive with widely used heuristic algorithms for
Max-Cut, at the expense of increased computation time
From the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm to a Quantum Alternating Operator Ansatz
The next few years will be exciting as prototype universal quantum processors
emerge, enabling implementation of a wider variety of algorithms. Of particular
interest are quantum heuristics, which require experimentation on quantum
hardware for their evaluation, and which have the potential to significantly
expand the breadth of quantum computing applications. A leading candidate is
Farhi et al.'s Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm, which alternates
between applying a cost-function-based Hamiltonian and a mixing Hamiltonian.
Here, we extend this framework to allow alternation between more general
families of operators. The essence of this extension, the Quantum Alternating
Operator Ansatz, is the consideration of general parametrized families of
unitaries rather than only those corresponding to the time-evolution under a
fixed local Hamiltonian for a time specified by the parameter. This ansatz
supports the representation of a larger, and potentially more useful, set of
states than the original formulation, with potential long-term impact on a
broad array of application areas. For cases that call for mixing only within a
desired subspace, refocusing on unitaries rather than Hamiltonians enables more
efficiently implementable mixers than was possible in the original framework.
Such mixers are particularly useful for optimization problems with hard
constraints that must always be satisfied, defining a feasible subspace, and
soft constraints whose violation we wish to minimize. More efficient
implementation enables earlier experimental exploration of an alternating
operator approach to a wide variety of approximate optimization, exact
optimization, and sampling problems. Here, we introduce the Quantum Alternating
Operator Ansatz, lay out design criteria for mixing operators, detail mappings
for eight problems, and provide brief descriptions of mappings for diverse
problems.Comment: 51 pages, 2 figures. Revised to match journal pape
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