Performance of Variational Algorithms for Local Hamiltonian Problems on Random Regular Graphs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We design two variational algorithms to optimize specific 2-local Hamiltonians defined on graphs. Our algorithms are inspired by the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm. We develop formulae to analyze the energy achieved by these algorithms with high probability over random regular graphs in the infinite-size limit, using techniques from [arXiv:2110.14206]. The complexity of evaluating these formulae scales exponentially with the number of layers of the algorithms, so our numerical evaluation is limited to a small constant number of layers. We compare these algorithms to simple classical approaches and a state-of-the-art worst-case algorithm. We find that the symmetry inherent to these specific variational algorithms presents a major \emph{obstacle} to successfully optimizing the Quantum MaxCut (QMC) Hamiltonian on general graphs. Nonetheless, the algorithms outperform known methods to optimize the EPR Hamiltonian of [arXiv:2209.02589] on random regular graphs, and the QMC Hamiltonian when the graphs are also bipartite. As a special case, we show that with just five layers of our algorithm, we can already prepare states within 1.62% error of the ground state energy for QMC on an infinite 1D ring, corresponding to the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg spin chain.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".