Quantum Energy Landscape and VQA Optimization

Abstract

We study the effects of entanglement and control parameters on the energy landscape and optimization performance of the variational quantum circuit. Through a systematic analysis of the Hessian spectrum, we characterize the local geometry of the energy landscape at a random point and along an optimization trajectory. We argue that decreasing the entangling capability and increasing the number of circuit parameters have the same qualitative effect on the Hessian eigenspectrum. Both the low-entangling capability and the abundance of control parameters increase the curvature of non-flat directions, contributing to the efficient search of area-law entangled ground states as to the optimization accuracy and the convergence speed.