Quantum

Beyond the Mean Gap: What Transferred-Angle QAOA Retains on a Superconducting Processor

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Based on a feed excerpt; full article content has not been acquired. Source evidence retrieved 11/11/2026, 04:58:25 UTC.

Briefings

Research on the IBM Heron processor tested transferred-angle QAOA circuits for binary optimization, revealing that while these circuits retain 29% to 46% of their mean-gap improvement, they only achieve 5% to 15% of the probability of finding the optimum. This study validates a prediction that mean-gap metrics can miss critical optimization capabilities, specifically noting that near-optimal bitstrings were lost as much as the optimum itself.

Key points

• Transferred-angle QAOA circuits on the IBM Heron processor retained 29% to 46% of their mean-gap improvement over uniform sampling.
• Despite retaining mean-gap improvement, the probability of finding the optimum was only 5% to 15% of the noiseless case.

Context

This study investigates whether hardware executions of the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) can be validated solely by comparing mean cost against simulations, which may miss optimization capabilities. The research uses depth-2, transferred-angle QAOA circuits on the IBM Heron processor \texttt{ibm\_marrakesh} to test this hypothesis.

Limitations

The evidence is limited to a single city, region, or country (IBM Heron processor at the University of Michigan). The study covers only binary subproblems of an alternating-direction decomposition. Results are based on 768-shot blocks on a rugged planted family, and the device-matched noise model overestimated the retention of the optimum by five- to eightfold.

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