Promise of Graph Sparsification and Decomposition for Noise Reduction in QAOA: Analysis for Trapped-Ion Compilations

Quantum 10, 2185 (2026).

https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2026-08-07-2185

We develop new approximate compilation schemes that significantly reduce the expense of compiling the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) for solving the Max-Cut problem. Our main focus is on compilation with trapped-ion simulators using Pauli-$X$ operations and all-to-all Ising Hamiltonian $H_text{Ising}$ evolution generated by Molmer-Sorensen or optical dipole force interactions, though some of our results also apply to standard gate-based compilations. Our results are based on principles of graph sparsification and decomposition; the former reduces the number of edges in a graph while maintaining its cut structure, while the latter breaks a weighted graph into a small number of unweighted graphs. Though these techniques have been used as heuristics in various hybrid quantum algorithms, there have been no guarantees on their performance, to the best of our knowledge. This work provides the first provable guarantees using sparsification and decomposition to improve quantum noise resilience and reduce quantum circuit complexity.

For quantum hardware that uses edge-by-edge QAOA compilations, sparsification leads to a direct reduction in circuit complexity. For trapped-ion quantum simulators implementing all-to-all $H_{Ising}$ pulses, we show that for a $(1-epsilon)$ factor loss in the Max-Cut approximation ($epsilon gt 0)$, our compilations improve the (worst-case) number of $H_{Ising}$ pulses from $O(n^2)$ to $O(nlog(n/epsilon))$ and the (worst-case) number of Pauli-$X$ bit flips from $O(n^2)$ to $Oleft(frac{nlog(n/epsilon)}{epsilon^2}right)$ for $n$-node graphs. This is an asymptotic improvement for any constant $epsilon gt 0$. We demonstrate that significant improvements to the approximation ratio are obtained using decomposition in simulated trapped-ion experiments with dephasing noise. We further present a generic argument showing that sparsification results in an exponentially improved circuit fidelity lower bound in digital computing schemes based on one- and two-qubit gates, which are relevant to a wide variety of hardwares such as superconducting qubits and certain neutral atom or trapped ion setups, and more sophisticated noise models. We anticipate these approximate compilation techniques will be useful tools in a variety of future quantum computing experiments.