An angle rounding parameter initialization technique for ma-QAOA

The multi-angle quantum approximate optimization algorithm (ma-QAOA) is a recently introduced algorithm that gives at least the same approximation ratio as the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) and, in most cases, gives a significantly higher approximation ratio than QAOA. One drawback to ma-QAOA is that it uses significantly more classical parameters than QAOA, so the classical optimization component more complex. In this paper, we motivate a new parameter initialization strategy in which angles are initially randomly set to multiples of π/4 between -2π and 2π and this vector is used to seed one round of BFGS. We find that the parameter initialization strategy on four-vertex and eight-vertex data sets gives average approximation ratios of 0.931 and 0.894, respectively. This is comparable to the average approximation ratios of ma-QAOA where optimal parameters are found using BFGS with 1 random starting seed, which are 0.910 and 0.901 for the four-vertex and eight-vertex data sets.