Performance analysis of multi-angle QAOA for $$p > 1$$

In this paper we consider the scalability of multi-angle QAOA with respect to the number of QAOA layers. We found that MA-QAOA is able to significantly reduce the depth of QAOA circuits, by a factor of up to 4 for the considered data sets. Moreover, MA-QAOA is less sensitive to system size, therefore we predict that this factor will be even larger for big graphs. However, MA-QAOA was found to be not optimal for minimization of the total QPU time. Different optimization initialization strategies are considered and compared for both QAOA and MA-QAOA. Among them, a new initialization strategy is suggested for MA-QAOA that is able to consistently and significantly outperform random initialization used in the previous studies.