Evan Coleman

Peter Annis, Abe Kassem, Evan Coleman

The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is a promising algorithm for near-term quantum chemistry applications, but selecting optimal ansatz circuits remains challenging. Expressibility, a metric quantifying a circuit's ability to explore the Hilbert space, has been proposed as a guide for ansatz selection, but recent work showed it inconsistently predicts VQE performance under realistic noise for $H_2$. We extend this investigation to cover both $H_2$ and $H_3^+$ under four execution scenarios: ideal, noisy, and noisy with zero-noise extrapolation (ZNE) or probabilistic error cancellation (PEC). We find that error mitigation does not reliably restore expressibility's predictive power. ZNE reduces error for only 4 of 12 $H_2$ circuits and 4 of 6 $H_3^+$ circuits, while PEC actually increases error in 11 of 12 $H_2$ circuits and all 6 $H_3^+$ circuits. We reproduce and extend Saib et al.'s key finding that circuit rankings scramble under noise (Spearman $ρ\approx -0.1$ between ideal and noisy rankings), and identify a new result: ZNE largely preserves noisy rankings ($ρ= +0.80$ for $H_2$) while PEC actively reorders them ($ρ= -0.22$). Noisy expressibility, computed from density matrix simulations, strongly predicts unmitigated performance for $H_3^+$ (Pearson $r = +0.91$, $p = 0.01$), but this metric is computationally intractable at scale. We demonstrate that zero-cost circuit topology metrics such as two-qubit gate count provide comparable or superior predictive power for PEC degradation ($r = +0.96$ for $H_3^+$), while standard expressibility best predicts noisy and ZNE performance for $H_2$ ($r = +0.74$ and $r = +0.77$).

Evan Coleman

We study randomized stationary methods for symmetric positive definite linear systems in which component $j$ is selected with probability proportional to $|r_j|^\ell$. This power-weighted family interpolates continuously between uniform randomized Jacobi as $\ell \to 0$ and Gauss--Southwell greedy relaxation as $\ell \to \infty$. For the central case $\ell = 2$, we sharpen the standard one-step convergence analysis using the inverse participation ratio (IPR) $ν^2(r) = n\|r\|_4^4/\|r\|_2^4$, which equals $1$ when the residual is uniform and grows toward $n$ as it concentrates. The resulting bound amplifies the expected per-step progress by exactly $ν^2$ over the uniform-sampling baseline. The IPR can be computed online at $O(n)$ cost and doubles as a per-iteration diagnostic. We extend the analysis to asynchronous power-weighted Jacobi via the Avron--Druinsky--Gupta framework, obtaining an epoch-based convergence theorem in which the IPR controls both the progress coefficient and the allowed-delay window. Numerical experiments on shared-memory hardware support the sharpened bound and show the IPR trajectory is essentially concurrency-insensitive. Unexpectedly, consistent-reads execution, the easier case for the ADG analysis, destabilizes power-weighted sampling at high concurrency while inconsistent reads remain stable; the same IPR that amplifies progress amplifies a thread-collision rate that inconsistent reads appear to absorb. We propose a feedback-damping mechanism and verify two predictions about its dependence on problem size.

Evan Coleman, Masha Sosonkina

Asynchronous iterative methods tolerate straggling processors by allowing workers to proceed with stale data, but at a cost: the iterates become inconsistent, potentially degrading convergence. We investigate whether convergence accelerators such as Anderson acceleration compensate for this degradation. We experimentally study three fixed-point iterations: the Jacobi method for sparse linear systems, value iteration for the Bellman equation, and the Hartree--Fock self-consistent field (SCF) iteration. The experiments are conducted using a high-performance execution framework Ray, which abstracts the complexity of distributed systems and enables code parallelization and fault injection with minimal changes. We establish two main results. First, straggler tolerance is universal: asynchronous execution provides wall-clock speedups of $2.9\times$ (Jacobi), $7.7\times$ (VI), and $16.9\times$ (SCF) over synchronous execution with a 100\,ms-delayed worker, independent of whether acceleration is used. Second, Anderson acceleration's effectiveness under asynchrony depends on where staleness enters the computation. We identify two staleness mechanisms: iterate-level corruption, where stale worker returns directly overwrite portions of the accelerated iterate (as in block Jacobi), and evaluation-level perturbation, where staleness acts as a bounded perturbation to the fixed-point map evaluation (as in VI and SCF). Anderson acceleration fails categorically under the first mechanism but retains its benefits under the second, consistent with the perturbation analysis of Toth et al.\ (2017). This distinction, rather than the contraction norm or smoothness of the map, is the primary determinant of whether acceleration survives asynchronous execution.

Sujay Nair, Evan Coleman, Sherrie Wang et al.

Minerals play a critical role in the advanced energy technologies necessary for decarbonization, but characterizing mineral deposits hidden underground remains costly and challenging. Inspired by recent progress in generative modeling, we develop a learning method which infers the locations of minerals by masking and infilling geospatial maps of resource availability. We demonstrate this technique using mineral data for the conterminous United States, and train performant models, with the best achieving Dice coefficients of $0.31 \pm 0.01$ and recalls of $0.22 \pm 0.02$ on test data at 1$\times$1 mi$^2$ spatial resolution. One major advantage of our approach is that it can easily incorporate auxiliary data sources for prediction which may be more abundant than mineral data. We highlight the capabilities of our model by adding input layers derived from geophysical sources, along with a nation-wide ground survey of soils originally intended for agronomic purposes. We find that employing such auxiliary features can improve inference performance, while also enabling model evaluation in regions with no recorded minerals.