Quantum Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for Semidefinite Programming

Abstract: Semidefinite programming (SDP) is a fundamental convex optimization problem with wide-ranging applications. However, solving large-scale instances remains computationally challenging due to the high cost of solving linear systems and performing eigenvalue decompositions. In this paper, we present a quantum alternating direction method of multipliers (QADMM) for SDPs, building on recent advances in quantum computing. An inexact ADMM framework is developed, which tolerates errors in the iterates arising from block-encoding approximation and quantum measurement. Within this robust scheme, we design a polynomial proximal operator to address the semidefinite conic constraints and apply the quantum singular value transformation to accelerate the most costly projection updates. We prove that the scheme converges to an $\epsilon$-optimal solution of the SDP problem under the strong duality assumption. A detailed complexity analysis shows that the QADMM algorithm achieves favorable scaling with respect to dimension compared to the classical ADMM algorithm and quantum interior point methods, highlighting its potential for solving large-scale SDPs.