Enhancing NDAR with Delay-Gate-Induced Amplitude Damping

Abstract: The Noise-Directed Adaptive Remapping (NDAR) method utilizes amplitude damping noise to enhance the performance of quantum optimization algorithms. NDAR alternates between exploration by sampling solutions from the quantum circuit and exploitation by transforming the cost Hamiltonian by changing the signs of its terms. Both exploration and exploitation are important components in classical heuristic algorithm design. In this study, we examine how NDAR performance improves by adjusting the balance between these components. We control the degree of exploitation by varying the delay time to 0, 50, and $100~\mu\text{s}$, and investigate exploration strategies using two quantum circuits, QAOA and a random circuit, on IBM's Heron processor. Our results show that increasing delay time in NDAR improves the best objective value found in each iteration. In single-layer QAOA and random circuits applied to unweighted Max-Cut problem with low edge density, both exploration strategies yield similar objective value trajectories and provide competitive solution quality to simulated annealing for the 80-node problem. Their similar performance indicates that, in most cases, increasing amplitude damping noise via additional delay time results in information loss. On the other hand, QAOA outperforms random circuits in specific cases, such as positive-negative weighted Max-Cut on a fully connected graph. This suggests potential advantages of QAOA in more complex settings. We further develop a classical NDAR to better understand exploration strategies, demonstrating that controlling the Hamming weight distribution of sampled bitstrings yields higher quality solutions. This suggests that identifying suitable quantum circuits for exploration could enhance NDAR performance.