Near-optimal circuit design for variational quantum optimization

Current state-of-the-art quantum optimization algorithms require representing the original problem as a binary optimization problem, which is then converted into an equivalent Ising model suitable for the quantum device. Implementing each term of the Ising model separately often results in high redundancy, significantly increasing the resources required. We overcome this issue by replacing the term-wise implementation of the Ising model with its equivalent simulation through a quantized version of a classical pseudocode function. This results in a new variant of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), which we name the Functional QAOA (FUNC-QAOA). By exploiting this idea for optimization tasks like the Travelling Salesman Problem and Max- K -Cut, we obtain circuits which are near-optimal with respect to all relevant cost measures (e.g., number of qubits, gates, circuit depth). While we demonstrate the power of FUNC-QAOA only for a particular set of paradigmatic problems, our approach is conveniently applicable for generic optimization problems.