Accelerating Continuous Variable Coherent Ising Machines via Momentum

Understand

The Coherent Ising Machine (CIM) is a non-conventional architecture that takes inspiration from physical annealing processes to solve Ising problems heuristically.

• Its dynamics are naturally continuous and described by a set of ordinary differential equations that have been proven to be useful for the optimization of continuous variables non-convex quadratic optimization problems.
• The dynamics of such Continuous Variable CIMs (CV-CIM) encourage optimization via optical pulses whose amplitudes are determined by the negative gradient of the objective; however, standard gradient descent is known to be trapped by local minima and hampered by poor problem conditioning.
• In this work, we propose to modify the CV-CIM dynamics using more sophisticated pulse injections based on tried-and-true optimization techniques such as momentum and Adam.