Mean-Field QAOA: A quantum inspired classical optimization algorithm

We would like to understand speedup for QAOA and see for what kind of problems QAOA can benefficiently approximated. For this goal, we have developed a mean-field type approach called Mean Field QAOA (MF-QAOA) in which each qubit is represented by its three spin projections. MF-QAOA mimics the classical trajectory of the time-evolution generated by QAOA. We benchmark the performance of MF-QAOA against its quantum counterpart on different standard optimization problems like graph coloring.