Beyond the Mean Gap: What Transferred-Angle QAOA Retains on a Superconducting Processor

arXiv:2611.10529v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hardware executions of the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) are often validated by comparing the device's mean cost with a simulation, a check that can miss what matters for optimization. Under global depolarization, the mean normalized gap and the floor-corrected probability of every set of bitstrings, the optimum included, retain the same fraction of their noiseless improvement over uniform sampling. We test this prediction with depth-2, transferred-angle QAOA circuits for binary subproblems of an alternating-direction decomposition on the IBM Heron processor \texttt{ibm\_marrakesh}, with and without dynamical decoupling and twirling.