Beyond the Mean Gap: What Transferred-Angle QAOA Retains on a Superconducting Processor

Sanim Yousuf Fahim, Mohammad Arif Hossain

Hardware executions of the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) are often validated by comparing the device's mean cost with a simulation, a check that can miss what matters for optimization. Under global depolarization, the mean normalized gap and the floor-corrected probability of every set of bitstrings, the optimum included, retain the same fraction of their noiseless improvement over uniform sampling. We test this prediction with depth-2, transferred-angle QAOA circuits for binary subproblems of an alternating-direction decomposition on the IBM Heron processor \texttt{ibm\_marrakesh}, with and without dynamical decoupling and twirling. At 12 qubits, the main-family circuits retained 29\% to 46\% of their mean-gap improvement but only 5\% to 15\% of their probability of the optimum, lower on at least nine of ten instances per run. Near-optimal bitstrings were lost about as much as the optimum, whereas the avoidance of poor bitstrings was retained best. In the first submission, a device-matched noise model reproduced the pattern but overestimated the retention of the optimum five- to eightfold. On a rugged planted family, the device found the optimum in 62\% of…