Increasing the hardness of posiform planting using random QUBOs for programmable quantum annealer benchmarking

Pelofske, Elijah; Hahn, Georg; Djidjev, Hristo N.

doi:10.1038/s44335-025-00032-6

Increasing the hardness of posiform planting using random QUBOs for programmable quantum annealer benchmarking

Journal Article · Wed Jul 23 00:00:00 EDT 2025 · npj Unconventional Computing

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1038/s44335-025-00032-6· OSTI ID:2574171

^[1]; Hahn, Georg ^[2]; ^[3]

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Harvard University, Boston, MA (United States)
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States); Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia (Bulgaria); Centre of Excellence in Informatics and Information and Communication Technologies, Sofia (Bulgaria)

Posiform planting is a method for constructing QUBO instances with a unique planted solution that can be tailored to arbitrary connectivity graphs. In this study we investigate making posiform planted QUBOs computationally harder by fusing many smaller random Ising models, whose global minimum is computed classically, with posiform planted QUBOs. The unique ground state of the resulting QUBO is the concatenation of (exactly one of) the ground states of each smaller problem. Our method generates QUBO instances that have a unique solution, are native to the hardware graph, and have tunable computational hardness. We use our QUBOs to benchmark three D-Wave quantum annealing processors (with 563–5627 qubits), and compare them against simulated annealing and Gurobi. Surprisingly, we find that the D-Wave ground state sampling success rate is not dependent on the glued random QUBO size, and that some QUBO classes are solved at high success rates at short annealing times on the Zephyr processors.

View Accepted Manuscript (DOE)

Research Organization:: Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: European Union; USDOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program; USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)

Grant/Contract Number:: 89233218CNA000001

OSTI ID:: 2574171

Report Number(s):: LA-UR--24-26772; 3004-8672; 10.1038/s44335-025-00032-6

Journal Information:: npj Unconventional Computing, Journal Name: npj Unconventional Computing Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 2; ISSN 3004-8672

Publisher:: Springer NatureCopyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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Posiform planting: generating QUBO instances for benchmarking

Journal Article · Mon Nov 20 19:00:00 EST 2023 · Frontiers in Computer Science · OSTI ID:2217616

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71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS
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97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
Computational science
D-Wave
Mathematics and computing
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QUBO
Quantum physics
combinatorial optimization
posiform planting
quantum annealing
quantum computing
solution planting

Increasing the hardness of posiform planting using random QUBOs for programmable quantum annealer benchmarking

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