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Given their potential to demonstrate near-term quantum advantage, variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) have been extensively studied. Although numerous techniques have been developed for VQA parameter optimization, it remains a significant challenge. A practical issue is that quantum noise is highly unstable and thus it is likely to shift in real time. This presents a critical problem as an optimized VQA ansatz may not perform effectively under a different noise environment. For the first time, we explore how to optimize VQA parameters to be robust against unknown shifted noise. We model the noise level as a random variable with an unknown probability density function (PDF), and we assume that the PDF may shift within an uncertainty set. This assumption guides us to formulate a distributionally robust optimization problem, with the goal of finding parameters that maintain effectiveness under shifted noise. We utilize a distributionally robust Bayesian optimization solver for our proposed formulation. This provides numerical evidence in both the quantum approximate optimization algorithm and the variational quantum eigensolver with hardware-efficient ansatz, indicating that we can identify parameters that perform more robustly under shifted noise. We regard this work as the first step toward improving the reliability of VQAs influenced by shifted noise from the parameter optimization perspective 

One of the key problems in tensor network based quantum circuit simulation is the construction of a contraction tree which minimizes the cost of the simulation, where the cost can be expressed in the number of operations as a proxy for the simulation running time. This same problem arises in a variety of application areas, such as combinatorial scientific computing, marginalization in probabilistic graphical models, and solving constraint satisfaction problems. In this paper, we reduce the computationally hard portion of this problem to one of graph linear ordering, and demonstrate how existing approaches in this area can be utilized to achieve results up to several orders of magnitude better than existing state of the art methods for the same running time. To do so, we introduce a novel polynomial time algorithm for constructing an optimal contraction tree from a given order. Furthermore, we introduce a fast and high quality linear ordering solver, and demonstrate its applicability as a heuristic for providing orderings for contraction trees. Finally, we compare our solver with competing methods for constructing contraction trees in quantum circuit simulation on a collection of randomly generated Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm Max Cut circuits and show that our method achieves superior results on a majority of tested quantum circuits. Reproducibility: Our source code and data are available at https://github.com/cameton/HPEC2022_ContractionTrees. 

Fabrication process variations can significantly influence the performance and yield of nano-scale electronic and photonic circuits. Stochastic spectral methods have achieved great success in quantifying the impact of process variations, but they suffer from the curse of dimensionality. Recently, low-rank tensor methods have been developed to mitigate this issue, but two fundamental challenges remain open: how to automatically determine the tensor rank and how to adaptively pick the informative simulation samples. This paper proposes a novel tensor regression method to address these two challenges. We use a ℓq/ℓ2 group-sparsity regularization to determine the tensor rank. The resulting optimization problem can be efficiently solved via an alternating minimization solver. We also propose a two-stage adaptive sampling method to reduce the simulation cost. Our method considers both exploration and exploitation via the estimated Voronoi cell volume and nonlinearity measurement respectively. The proposed model is verified with synthetic and some realistic circuit benchmarks, on which our method can well capture the uncertainty caused by 19 to 100 random variables with only 100 to 600 simulation samples. 

Uncertainty quantification based on stochastic spectral methods suffers from the curse of dimensionality. This issue was mitigated recently by low-rank tensor methods. However, there exist two fundamental challenges in low-rank tensor-based uncertainty quantification: how to automatically determine the tensor rank and how to pick the simulation samples. This paper proposes a novel tensor regression method to address these two challenges. Our method uses an 12,p-norm regularization to determine the tensor rank and an estimated Voronoi diagram to pick informative samples for simulation. The proposed framework is verified by a 19-dim phonics bandpass filter and a 57-dim CMOS ring oscillator, capturing the high-dimensional uncertainty well with only 90 and 290 samples respectively.