Warm-Started QAOA with Custom Mixers Provably Converges and Computationally Beats Goemans-Williamson's Max-Cut at Low Circuit Depths

Reuben Tate, Jai Moondra, Bryan Gard +2

We generalize the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) of Farhi et al. (2014) to allow for arbitrary separable initial states with corresponding mixers such that the s…