Title: Introducing Quantum Error Mitigation Techniques into a QAOA Workflow

Speaker: Marco Venere

Area/Topic/Keywords: Quantum Computing, Errore Mitigation

Short Abstract:
Quantum computers have the potential to tackle complex problems with noticeable speedup with respect to classical computation. Yet, current quantum hardware is severely affected by noise, which deteriorates the quality of the solutions and prevents users from achieving acceptable performance. In this work, we consider the combinatorial optimization use case, with the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), and introduce quantum error mitigation techniques to reduce the effects of noise. We focus on zero-noise extrapolation (ZNE) as a state-of-the-art methodology, implemented by the Mitiq framework, and openQAOA as a state-of-the-art QAOA framework. We integrate ZNE into openQAOA and perform an exploration of the parameter space for both openQAOA and Mitiq toolchains, using the Maximum-Cut and the Knapsack problems as targets. We show the achieved improvement in terms of convergence of the QAOA algorithm and minimization of the cost function.