Destabilization of local minima in analog spin systems by correction of amplitude heterogeneity

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to destabilize local minima in analog spin systems by correcting amplitude heterogeneity, improving their ability to find lower energy states in complex energy landscapes.

Contribution

It proposes extending the phase space with error signals to correct amplitude inhomogeneity and control divergence, enhancing analog spin system performance.

Findings

Destabilizes local minima in analog spin systems.

Achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art heuristics.

Improves the ability to find lower energy configurations.

Abstract

The relaxation of binary spins to analog values has been the subject of much debate in the field of statistical physics, neural networks, and more recently quantum computing, notably because the benefits of using an analog state for finding lower energy spin configurations are usually offset by the negative impact of the improper mapping of the energy function that results from the relaxation. We show that it is possible to destabilize trapping sets of analog states that correspond to local minima of the binary spin Hamiltonian by extending the phase space to include error signals that correct amplitude inhomogeneity of the analog spin states and controlling the divergence of their velocity. Performance of the proposed analog spin system in finding lower energy states is competitive against state-of-the-art heuristics.