Two-stage Distributed Variational Quantum Eigensolver Software for QUBO and Quadratic Programming

This paper proposes a two-stage distributed variational quantum eigensolver (DVQE) software for solving quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems and bounded constrained quadratic programming (QP) problems.

The proposed DVQE solver supports both monolithic and distributed quantum-circuit execution and evaluates QUBO objectives directly from measured bitstrings.

To improve variational training, DVQE uses a two-stage procedure that combines metaheuristic warm-start initialization with sampling-based variational refinement.

The software supports several metaheuristic approaches as warm-start strategies.

To extend QUBO-based quantum optimization to constrained continuous problems, this paper also develops a sequential QP to QUBO framework, called QQP.

QQP first scales the bounded continuous variables to a normalized box and then handles equality and inequality constraints using a Powell-Hestenes-Rockafellar (PHR) augmented-Lagrangian formulation.

Under a fixed PHR active region, the constrained augmented-Lagrangian subproblem becomes an ordinary bounded quadratic problem.

QQP then solves this bounded quadratic problem through repeated local one-bit QUBO reformulations, where each binary variable represents a local up/down move of one continuous variable inside a trust region.

In this way, QQP converts a constrained continuous QP into a sequence of QUBO subproblems without introducing slack variables.

Each local QUBO subproblem can be solved using either a classical QUBO backend or the proposed DVQE solver.

Numerical experiments evaluate the proposed software on QUBO and QP test problems.

The results show that the distributed DVQE framework can recover high-quality QUBO solutions, and that the QQP framework can solve bounded constrained QP instances with small optimality, feasibility, and solution gaps.