English

On the hardness of quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problems

Quantum Physics 2025-11-04 v1

Abstract

We use exact enumeration to characterize the solutions of quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problems of less than 21 variables in terms of their distributions of Hamming distances to close-by solutions. We also perform experiments with the D-Wave Advantage 5.1 quantum annealer, solving many instances of up to 170-variable, quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problems. Our results demonstrate that the exponents characterizing the success probability of a D-Wave annealer to solve a QUBO correlate very well with the predictions based on the Hamming distance distributions computed for small problem instances.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2206.11689,
  title  = {On the hardness of quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problems},
  author = {Vrinda Mehta and Fengping Jin and Kristel Michielsen and Hans De Raedt},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.11689},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

6 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T12:01:47.201Z