Fuzzy Clustering for QAOA Complexity Reduction

The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) has become one of the most widely used components in the development of modern quantum applications. It works on the paradigm of quantum variational circuits, where a quantum circuit is trained - by repeatedly adjusting circuit parameters - to adequately solve a combinatorial optimization problem. This training process, based on classical optimization algorithms, represents a significant computational bottleneck for QAOA, as it requires repeated calls to the quantum device to evaluate the cost function of the problem to solve. Therefore, there is a strong need to eliminate this computationally expensive task and identify an alternative strategy to compute good parameters for QAOA. This paper synergistically exploits the parameter concentration property of QAOA and the Fuzzy C-Means algorithm to achieve this goal. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can support QAOA to maintain high performance in solving well-known optimization problems such as MAXCUT, requiring a reduced computational effort for the parameter tuning phase.