Quantifying the barren plateau phenomenon for a model of unstructured variational ansätze

Abstract: Quantifying the flatness of the objective-function landscape associated with unstructured parameterized quantum circuits is important for understanding the performance of variational algorithms utilizing a "hardware-efficient ansatz", particularly for ensuring that a prohibitively flat landscape -- a so-called "barren plateau" -- is avoided. For a model of such ans\"{a}tze, we relate the typical landscape flatness to a certain family of random walks, enabling us to derive a Monte Carlo algorithm for efficiently, classically estimating the landscape flatness for any architecture. The statistical picture additionally allows us to prove new analytic bounds on the barren plateau phenomenon, and more generally provides novel insights into the phenomenon's dependence on the ansatz depth, architecture, qudit dimension, and Hamiltonian combinatorial and spatial locality. Our analysis utilizes techniques originally developed by Dalzell et al. to study anti-concentration in random circuits.