Hybrid Quantum Neighborhood Selection: NISQ-Compatible Combinatorial Optimization via Stochastic Frontier Decomposition

Abstract

Large-scale combinatorial optimization is a challenge for near-term quantum computing because dense Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) formulations yield interaction graphs that exceed the limits of NISQ processors. This work introduces Hybrid Quantum Neighborhood Selection (HQNS), a hybrid framework mitigating this via stochastic frontier decomposition. Instead of encoding all N variables into a monolithic circuit, HQNS selects a compact frontier of F << N active variables per stage, freezing the rest into reduced QUBO coefficients. A multi-stage crawling procedure rotates these frontiers, letting local quantum subproblems refine a global solution. We evaluate HQNS on the Maximum Diversity Subset Selection Problem (MDSSP) across six scales, N up to 1000. Circuit burden is reduced from the dense QAOA requirement of O(N^2) two-qubit terms per layer to O(F^2) per stage, with total complexity governed by the number of stages and classical overhead. Benchmarks show that HQNS achieves competitive solution quality relative to parallel simulated annealing (SA) while maintaining bounded circuit width and stable QPU time. In the N=1000 benchmark over ten executions, HQNS preserves 99.9908% of the mean diversity score of an 11-restart parallel SA baseline, while reducing wall-clock time by 65.03%, peak CPU usage by 55.97%, and peak memory by 35.21%. Ablation shows performance depends on frontier size, warm-starts, CVaR filtering, and stochastic rotation. These results demonstrate that structured frontier decomposition makes variational optimization executable for dense QUBO instances unsuitable for direct QAOA on present hardware.