Interpolation-based coordinate descent method for parameterized quantum circuits

Parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) are ubiquitous in the design of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms. In this work, we propose an interpolation-based coordinate descent (ICD) method to address the parameter optimization problem in PQCs. The ICD method provides a unified framework for existing structure optimization techniques such as Rotosolve, sequential minimal optimization, ExcitationSolve, and others. ICD employs interpolation to approximate the PQC cost function, effectively recovering its underlying trigonometric structure, and then performs an argmin update on a single parameter in each iteration. In contrast to previous studies on structure optimization, we determine the optimal interpolation nodes to mitigate statistical errors arising from quantum measurements. Moreover, in the common case of r equidistant frequencies, we show that the optimal interpolation nodes are equidistant nodes with spacing 2π/ (2r+1) (under constant variance assumption), and that our ICD method simultaneously minimizes the mean squared error, the condition number of the interpolation matrix, and the average variance of the approximated cost function. We perform numerical simulations and test on the MaxCut problem, the transverse field Ising model, and the XXZ model. Numerical results imply that our ICD method is more efficient than the commonly used gradient descent and random coordinate descent method.