Stone-in-Waiting: A Cloud-Based Accelerator for the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 20 Mar 2026] Stone-in-Waiting: A Cloud-Based Accelerator for the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm Shuai Zeng The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) and its advanced variant, the Quantum Alternating Operator Ansatz (QAOA), are major research topics in the current era of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computing. However, the problem of initializing their parameters remains unresolved. Motivated by the combinatorial optimization task in the 6th MindSpore Quantum Computing Hackathon (2024), this paper proposes Stone-in-Waiting, a cloud-based accelerator for obtaining high-quality initial parameters for QAOA. Internally, the accelerator builds on state-of-the-art theories and methods for parameter determination and integrates four self-developed algorithms for QAOA parameter initialization, mainly based on Bayesian methods, nearest-neighbor methods, and metric learning. Compared with the Baseline Algorithm, the generated parameters improve the score by 40.19%. Externally, the accelerator offers both a web interface and an API, providing flexible and convenient access for users to test and develop related experiments and applications. This paper presents the design principles and methods of Stone-in-Waiting, demonstrates its functional characteristics, compares the strengths and weaknesses of the four proposed algorithms, and validates the overall system performance through experiments. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC) Cite as: arXiv:2603.19980 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2603.19980v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.19980 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Shuai Zeng [view email] [v1] Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:23:57 UTC (9,003 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.DC References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation 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 Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)