Investigating Different Barren Plateaus Mitigation Strategies in Variational Quantum Eigensolver
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Quantum Physics arXiv:2512.11171 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 11 Dec 2025] Title:Investigating Different Barren Plateaus Mitigation Strategies in Variational Quantum Eigensolver Authors:Mostafa Atallah, Nouhaila Innan, Muhammad Kashif, Muhammad Shafique View a PDF of the paper titled Investigating Different Barren Plateaus Mitigation Strategies in Variational Quantum Eigensolver, by Mostafa Atallah and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) algorithms suffer from barren plateaus, where gradients vanish with system size and circuit depth. Although many mitigation strategies exist, their connection to convergence performance under different iteration budgets remains unclear. Moreover, a systematic analysis identifying which state-of-the-art mitigation techniques perform best under specific scenarios is also lacking. We benchmark four approaches, Local-Global, Adiabatic, State Efficient Ansatz (SEA), and Pretrained VQE, against standard VQE on molecular systems from 4 to 14 qubits, analyzing gradient variance up to 50 layers and convergence over 1000 iterations. Our results show that the impact of gradient preservation is iteration-dependent. In the 14-qubit BeH2 system, Pretrained VQE outperforms SEA at 100 iterations despite lower gradient variance, but SEA becomes 2.2x more accurate at 1000 iterations. For smaller systems, SEA achieves near-exact energies (H2: 10^-5 Ha, LiH: 2x10^-4 Ha) with fidelities 0.999, while standard methods plateau early. The results demonstrate that robust barren plateau mitigation depends on aligning the chosen strategy with both system size and available computational budget, rather than treating gradient variance as the sole predictor of performance. Comments: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2512.11171 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2512.11171v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.11171 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Mostafa Atallah [view email] [v1] Thu, 11 Dec 2025 23:25:40 UTC (2,820 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Investigating Different Barren Plateaus Mitigation Strategies in Variational Quantum Eigensolver, by Mostafa Atallah and 3 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2025-12 References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)