H-EFT-VA: An Effective-Field-Theory Variational Ansatz with Provable Barren Plateau Avoidance

arXiv:2601.10479v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) are critically threatened by the Barren Plateau (BP) phenomenon. In this work, we introduce the H-EFT Variational Ansatz (H-EFT-VA), an architecture inspired by Effective Field Theory (EFT). By enforcing a hierarchical "UV-cutoff" on initialization, we theoretically restrict the circuit's state exploration, preventing the formation of approximate unitary 2-designs. We provide a rigorous proof that this localization guarantees an inverse-polynomial lower bound on the gradient variance: Var[partialheta] in Omega(1/poly(N)). Crucially, unlike approaches that avoid BPs by limiting entanglement, we demonstrate that H-EFT-VA maintains volume-law entanglement and near-Haar purity, ensuring sufficient expressibility for complex quantum states. Extensive benchmarking across 16 experiments on the Transverse Field Ising Model confirms a 109x improvement in energy convergence and a 10.7x increase in ground-state fidelity over standard Hardware-Efficient Ansatze (HEA), with statistical significance of p < 10^{-88}. The static framework is most effective for Hamiltonians with moderate reference-state overlap; extension to systems with larger reference-state gaps is addressed through dynamic UV-cutoff relaxation strategies explored in concurrent work.

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Source: arXiv cs.LG | 2026-04-24