Landscape Compression in Constrained QAOA Tracks Feasibility Loss on IBM Heron Hardware
This study introduced Landscape Span Compression (LSC), a new metric to measure how hardware noise distorts the energy landscape of QAOA on IBM Heron hardware. LSC quantifies noise-induced flattening of the landscape, showing that while parameters transfer safely, practitioners must account for a consistent 24-30% loss in approximation ratio due to noise.