Achieving fair sampling in quantum annealing

Abstract: Sampling all ground states of a Hamiltonian with equal probability is a desired feature of a sampling algorithm, but recent studies indicate that common variants of transverse field quantum annealing sample the ground state subspace unfairly. In this note, we present perturbation theory arguments suggesting that this deficiency can be corrected by employing reverse annealing-inspired paths. We confirm that this conclusion holds in simulations of previously studied small instances with degeneracy, as well as larger instances on quantum annealing hardware.