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Variational quantum algorithms are promising candidates for near-term quantum computing but can be hindered by barren plateaus, where gradients vanish exponentially and optimization becomes intractable. Noise-Induced Barren Plateaus (NIBP)…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-10 Sebastian Schmitt , Linus Ekstrøm , Alberto Bottarelli , Xavier Bonet-Monroig

The optimization of quantum circuits can be hampered by a decay of average gradient amplitudes with increasing system size. When the decay is exponential, this is called the barren plateau problem. Considering explicit circuit…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-09-12 Qiang Miao , Thomas Barthel

Training deep quantum neural networks (QNNs) for image classification is notoriously difficult due to vanishing gradients (barren plateaus) and limited nonlinearity in purely unitary circuits. We propose a novel gradient-free…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-05-09 Yichen Xie

Gradient-based optimization is a key ingredient of variational quantum algorithms, with applications ranging from quantum machine learning to quantum chemistry and simulation. The parameter-shift rule provides a hardware-friendly method for…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-10-08 Leonardo Banchi , Dominic Branford , Chetan Waghela

Quantum architecture search (QAS) involves optimizing both the quantum parametric circuit configuration but also its parameters for a variational quantum algorithm. Thus, the problem is known to be multi-level as the performance of a given…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-07-30 Vicente P. Soloviev , Vedran Dunjko , Concha Bielza , Pedro Larrañaga , Hao Wang

Variational quantum algorithms are a promising class of algorithms that can be performed on currently available quantum computers. In most settings, the free parameters of a variational circuit are optimized using a classical optimizer that…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-07-12 Roeland Wiersema , Nathan Killoran

Two-stage stochastic programming is a popular framework for optimization under uncertainty, where decision variables are split between first-stage decisions, and second-stage (or recourse) decisions, with the latter being adjusted after…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-19 Antonio Alcántara , Carlos Ruiz , Calvin Tsay

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) promise near-term quantum advantage, yet parametrized quantum states commonly built from the digital gate-based approach often suffer from scalability issues such as barren plateaus, where the loss…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-02-11 Kasidit Srimahajariyapong , Supanut Thanasilp , Thiparat Chotibut

We define \emph{laziness} to describe a large suppression of variational parameter updates for neural networks, classical or quantum. In the quantum case, the suppression is exponential in the number of qubits for randomized variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Junyu Liu , Zexi Lin , Liang Jiang

While variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) have demonstrated considerable success in unconstrained optimization, their application to constrained combinatorial problems face a trade-off. Penalty-based methods, despite their circuit…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-09 Hui-Min Li , Yuan-Liang Han , Zhi-Xi Wang , Shao-Ming Fei

We find that using neural networks to generate quantum states can effectively alleviate the barren plateau phenomenon present in random variational quantum circuits.

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-12-01 Zhehao Yi , Rahul Bhadani

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…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-12-20 Kunal Marwaha , Adrian She , James Sud

This paper considers the problem of quantum compilation from an optimization perspective by fixing a circuit structure of CNOTs and rotation gates then optimizing over the rotation angles. We solve the optimization problem classically and…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-07-16 Liam Madden , Albert Akhriev , Andrea Simonetto

The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm designed for current and near-term quantum devices. Despite its initial success, there is a lack of understanding involving several of its key aspects. There…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-03-22 Manpreet Singh Jattana , Fengping Jin , Hans De Raedt , Kristel Michielsen

We present a quantum algorithm for finding the minimum of a function based on multistep quantum computation and apply it for optimization problems with continuous variables, in which the variables of the problem are discretized to form the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-07-03 Hefeng Wang , Hua Xiang

Applications such as simulating complicated quantum systems or solving large-scale linear algebra problems are very challenging for classical computers due to the extremely high computational cost. Quantum computers promise a solution,…

In variational quantum algorithms the parameters of a parameterized quantum circuit are optimized in order to minimize a cost function that encodes the solution of the problem. The barren plateau phenomenon manifests as an exponentially…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-11-14 Marco Schumann , Frank K. Wilhelm , Alessandro Ciani

In this paper, we propose a general scheme to analyze the gradient vanishing phenomenon, also known as the barren plateau phenomenon, in training quantum neural networks with the ZX-calculus. More precisely, we extend the barren plateaus…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-06-09 Chen Zhao , Xiao-Shan Gao

Computing the ground state of interacting quantum matter is a long-standing challenge, especially for complex two-dimensional systems. Recent developments have highlighted the potential of neural quantum states to solve the quantum…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2025-07-03 Ao Chen , Markus Heyl

Variational algorithms are promising candidates to be implemented on near-term quantum computers. The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is a prominent example, where a parametrized trial state of the quantum mechanical wave function is…