Shot- and Noise-Aware Pauli Correlation Encoding for Max-Cut Experiments on IBM Heron Quantum Processor

Pauli correlation encoding (PCE) encodes $m$ binary variables in the signs of $k$-body Pauli correlators of $n=O(m^{1/k})$ qubits, and trains a parameterized circuit on a relaxed loss of sharpness $α$. The strongest published schedules sharpen this loss aggressively and are benchmarked with exact ex