Adaptive Qubit Freezing Enables Robust Graph Partitioning for Divide-and-Conquer QAOA

Abstract

Divide-and-conquer variants of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) provide a promising route for executing combinatorial optimization problems beyond the qubit capacity of near-term quantum devices. However, existing approaches rely on the existence of small vertex separators and fail entirely on dense or highly connected graphs where such decompositions do not exist. We introduce Frozen Large Graph Partitioning (FrozenLGP), an adaptive decomposition framework that transforms partitionability from an assumption into an enforceable property. When standard partitioning fails, FrozenLGP identifies the minimum set of obstructing vertices through a minimum-vertex-cut computation based on max-flow and classically freezes their spin assignments. The energetic contributions of the removed interactions are rigorously preserved by folding them into linear bias terms in the Ising Hamiltonian of neighboring active qubits. Across graph sizes up to 10,000 vertices and multiple topology families, FrozenLGP achieves 100\% decomposition coverage, compared with 4.6\% for the standard divide-and-conquer baseline on high-connectivity instances. End-to-end MaxCut experiments demonstrate that FrozenLGP preserves approximation quality on instances already solvable by conventional divide-and-conquer QAOA while extending applicability to previously unsupported graphs, and outperforming alternative full-coverage decomposition strategies. Noise simulations further show improved robustness arising from reduced entangling-gate requirements. These results establish FrozenLGP as a topology-robust front end for distributed QAOA on near-term quantum hardware.