Exponential Speed-ups for Structured Goemans-Williamson relaxations via Quantum Gibbs States and Pauli Sparsity

时   间:10:00-12:00, Jun 10, 2026 (Wed)

地   点:RM S327, MMW Building

内容:

Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problems are prevalent in various applications and are known to be NP-hard. The seminal work of Goemans and Williamson introduced a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation for such problems, solvable in polynomial time that upper bounds the optimal value. Their approach also enables randomized rounding techniques to obtain feasible solutions with provable performance guarantees.

In this work, we identify instances of QUBO problems where matrix multiplicative weight methods lead to quantum and quantum-inspired algorithms that approximate the Goemans-Williamson SDP exponentially faster than existing methods, achieving polylogarithmic time complexity relative to the problem dimension. This speedup is attainable under the assumption that the QUBO cost matrix is sparse when expressed as a linear combination of Pauli strings satisfying certain algebraic constraints, and leverages efficient quantum and classical simulation results for quantum Gibbs states.
   
We demonstrate how to verify these conditions efficiently given the decomposition. Additionally, we explore heuristic methods for randomized rounding procedures and extract the energy of a feasible point of the QUBO in polylogarithmic time. While the practical relevance of instances where our methods excel remains to be fully established, we propose heuristic algorithms with broader applicability and identify Kronecker graphs as a promising class for applying our techniques. We conduct numerical experiments to benchmark our methods. Notably, by utilizing tensor network methods, we solve an SDP with 2^{50} variables and extract a feasible point which is certifiably within 0.15% of the optimum of the QUBO through our approach on a desktop, reaching dimensions millions of times larger than those handled by existing SDP or QUBO solvers, whether heuristic or rigorous.

个人简介:

Haomu Yuan has been a Research Fellow at the Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore, since 2026, working with PI Professor Patrick Rebentrost. He began his PhD in 2022 at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Professor Crispin H.W. Barnes and Professor Daniel Stilck França. Haomu's main research interests include, but are not limited to, quantum optimization algorithms, quantum machine learning, quantum finance, and quantum foundations.


返回列表
演讲人 袁淏木 [北京大学] 时间 10:00-12:00, Jun 10, 2026 (Wed)
地点 RM S327, MMW Building EN
TOP