Performance of parity QAOA for the signed Max-Cut problem

Abstract The practical implementation of quantum optimization algorithms on noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices requires accounting for their limited connectivity. As such, the Parity architecture was introduced to overcome this limitation by encoding binary optimization problems onto planar quantum chips. We investigate the performance of the quantum approximate optimization algorithm on the Parity architecture (Parity QAOA) for solving instances of the signed Max-Cut problem on complete and regular graphs. By comparing the algorithms at fixed circuit depth, we demonstrate that Parity QAOA outperforms conventional QAOA implementations based on SWAP networks. Our analysis utilizes Clifford circuits to estimate lower performance bounds for Parity QAOA for problem sizes that would be otherwise inaccessible on classical computers. For single layer circuits we additionally benchmark the recursive variant of the two algorithms, showing that their performance is equal.