Variational Quantum Algorithm Parameter Tuning with Estimation of Distribution Algorithms

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) are hybrid approaches between classical and quantum computation, where a classical optimizer proposes parameter configurations for a quantum parametric circuit which is iteratively sampled. The overall performance of the algorithm depends on how the classical op...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2023 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) pp. 1 - 9
Main Authors: Soloviev, Vicente P., Larranaga, Pedro, Bielza, Concha
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.07.2023
Subjects:
Computational modeling
Cost function
Estimation
estimation of distribution algorithm
Evolutionary computation
gradient-based approach
gradient-free approach
Probabilistic logic
Quantum algorithm
Quantum computing
Quantum optimization
variational quantum algorithms
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Summary:Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) are hybrid approaches between classical and quantum computation, where a classical optimizer proposes parameter configurations for a quantum parametric circuit which is iteratively sampled. The overall performance of the algorithm depends on how the classical optimizer tunes the parameters of the quantum circuit. Several gradient-free and gradient-based approaches have been proposed in the literature to face this task. Estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs) are a type of evolutionary algorithms where a probabilistic model is updated and sampled at each generation to optimize a cost function. EDAs have shown to be able to achieve good solutions in a reasonable computation time for different optimization problems, and thus, we believe that this algorithm can be a good option to overcome VQAs challenges such as the Barren plateaus phenomenon. In this paper, we study the use of three different EDAs, characterized by different probabilistic model complexities, to tune the parameters of two different VQAs to solver the Max Cut problem and to a VQA to simulate the behaviour of a molecule. Three EDA variants are compared to some state-of-the-art optimizers widely used for this task. Our results show statistical significant improvement of the EDA variants compared to different optimizers, and identify the VQAs characteristics that best fit to each EDA type. We also perform an analysis of the main EDAs hyper-parameters.
DOI:10.1109/CEC53210.2023.10254138