Birdal, T., Golyanik, V., Theobalt, C., & Guibas, L. J. Quantum Permutation Synchronization. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (2021) pp. 13122-13133.

Abstract:

We present QuantumSync, the first quantum algorithm for solving a synchronization problem in the context of computer vision. In particular, we focus on permutation synchronization which involves solving a non-convex optimization problem in discrete variables. We start by formulating synchronization into a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problem (QUBO). While such formulation respects the binary nature of the problem, ensuring that the result is a set of permutations requires extra care. Hence, we: (i) show how to insert permutation constraints into a QUBO problem and (ii) solve the constrained QUBO problem on the current generation of the adiabatic quantum computers D-Wave. Thanks to the quantum annealing, we guarantee global optimality with high probability while sampling the energy landscape to yield confidence estimates. Our proof-of-concepts realization on the adiabatic D-Wave computer demonstrates that quantum machines offer a promising way to solve the prevalent yet difficult synchronization problems.

Bibtex: 

@inproceedings{birdal2021quantum,
  title={Quantum Permutation Synchronization},
  author={Birdal, Tolga and Golyanik, Vladislav and Theobalt, Christian and Guibas, Leonidas J},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
  pages={13122--13133},
  year={2021}
}