My research interest is applied graph theory, including domination, zero-forcing, graph theory games, quantum algorithms, quantum circuit compilation, and efficient quantum state preparation.

Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=CGJR52sAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

Publications

Underline denotes student or postdoc authors.

1. Brunet, M., Shah, S., Atallah, M., Wilkie, A., and Herrman, R. (2026, July). An Exclusive-Sum-of-Products Pipeline. In Frontiers in Industrial Engineering. Purdue Quantum AI: Fifth Gavriel Salvendy International Symposium, PQAI 2025, West Lafayette, IN, USA, October 23–24, 2025, Proceedings (p. 89). Springer Nature. 

2. Brešar, B., Hedžet, J., & Herrman, R. (2026). Bootstrap percolation and P3-hull number in direct products of graphs. Discussiones mathematicae: Graph theory, 46(1).

3. Gaidai, I., and Herrman, R. (2026). Decomposition of sparse amplitude permutation gates with application to preparation of sparse clustered quantum states: I. Gaidai, R. Herrman. Quantum Information Processing, 25(1), 31. 

4. Gonzales, A., Herrman, R., Campbell, C., Gaidai, I., Liu, J., Tomesh, T., and Saleem, Z. H. (2025). Efficient sparse state preparation via quantum walks. npj Quantum Information, 11(1), 143. 

5. Ameneyro, Bernardo, Herrman, R, Siopsis, G. and Maroulas, V. (2025) Quantum distance approximation for persistence diagrams. Journal of Physics: Complexity 6.1: 015005. 

6. Ponce, M., Herrman, R., Lotshaw, P. C., Powers, S., Siopsis, G., Humble, T., & Ostrowski, J. (2025). Graph decomposition techniques for solving combinatorial optimization problems with variational quantum algorithms. Quantum Information Processing, 24(2), 60. 

7. Gaidai, I., & Herrman, R. (2024). Performance analysis of multi-angle QAOA for p> 1. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 18911. 

8. Wilkie, A., Gaidai, I., Ostrowski, J., & Herrman, R. (2024). Quantum approximate optimization algorithm with random and subgraph phase operators. Physical Review A, 110(2), 022441. 

9. Bringman, S., Wilkie, A., Herrman, R., & Ostrowski, J. (2024, July). Mathematical model for SWAP gate minimization on NISQ hardware. In 2024 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI) (pp. 640-643). IEEE. 

10. Lotshaw, P. C., Siopsis, G., Ostrowski, J., Herrman, R., Alam, R., Powers, S., & Humble, T. S. (2023). Approximate Boltzmann distributions in quantum approximate optimization. Physical Review A, 108(4), 042411. 

11. Alam, R., Siopsis, G., Herrman, R., Ostrowski, J., Lotshaw, P.C., Humble, T.S., “Solving MaxCut with quantum imaginary time evolution”. Quantum Inf Process (2023)

12. Shi, K., Herrman, R., Shaydulin, R., Chakrabarti, S., Pistoia, M., & Larson, J. "Multi-Angle QAOA Does Not Always Need All Its Angles." IEEE/ACM 7th Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC) (2022).

13. Herrman, R. "The (d− 2)-leaky forcing number of Qd and ℓ-leaky forcing number of GP (n, 1)." Discrete Optimization, 46, 100744 (2022). 

14. Lotshaw, P.C., Nguyen, T., Santana, A. et al. "Scaling quantum approximate optimization on near-term hardware." Sci Rep 12, 12388 (2022). 

15. Herrman, R., & Smith, S. G. "On the length of L-Grundy sequences." Discrete Optimization, 45, 100725 (2022). 

16. Herrman, R., Lotshaw, P.C., Ostrowski, J., Humble, T.S., Siopsis, G., “Multi-angle quantum approximate optimization algorithm”.  Scientific Reports, 12(1), 1-10.

17. Herrman, R., van Hintum, P., Smith, Stephen G.Z. “Capture times in the bridge-burning cops and robbers game”.  Discrete Applied Mathematics, 317, 10-17.

18. Herrman, R., and Wong, T.G. "Simplifying continuous-time quantum walks on dynamic graphs." Quantum Inf Process 21, 2 (2022): 1-29 

19. Herrman, R., Treffert L., Ostrowski J., Lotshaw P.C., Humble T.S., and Siopsis G. “Impact of graph structures for QAOA on MaxCut” Quantum Inf Process 20, 289 (2021). 

20. Lotshaw, P.C., Humble, T.S., Herrman, R., Ostrowski, J. and Siopsis, G. "Empirical performance bounds for quantum approximate optimization." Quantum Inf Process 20, 12 (2021): 1-32.

21. Herrman, R., Treffert, L., Ostrowski, J., Lotshaw, P.C., Humble, T.S., Siopsis, G. “Globally optimizing QAOA circuit depth for constrained optimization problems.”  Algorithms 2021, 14, 294. 

22. Herrman, R. and van Hintum, P.  “The (t,r) broadcast domination number of some regular graphs,” Discrete Applied Mathematics, Vol. 289 (2021).

23. Herrman, R., Ostrowski, J., Humble, T.S., Siopsis, G. “Lower bounds on circuit depth of the quantum approximate optimization algorithm.” Quantum Inf Process 20, 59 (2021). 

24. Dvořák, V., Herrman, R., and van Hintum, P. “The eternal game chromatic number of random graphs,” European Journal of Combinatorics. (2021)

25. Herrman, R. and Humble, T.S.  “Continuous-time quantum walks on dynamic graphs,” Phys. Rev. A 100, 012306 (2019).

Pre-prints

Underline denotes student or postdoc authors.

1. Mahmud, J., Winship, J., Lash, T., Ostrowski, J., and Herrman, R. (2026). Explicit Block Encoding of Difference-of-Gaussian Operators on a Periodic Grid. arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.09538. Accepted to QCE26 (QAPP track). 

2. Atallah, M., and Herrman, R. (2026). Layer-wise QUBO-Based Training of CNN Classifiers for Quantum Annealing. arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.02958. Under review at Quanum Machine Intelligence

3. Atallah, M., Gonzales, A., Dilley, D., Gaidai, I., Saleem, Z. H., and Herrman, R. (2026). Simulating Quantum Walk Hamiltonians without Pauli Decomposition. arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.11418. Under review at Quantum.

4. Vittal, S., Wilkie, A., Rastegari, N., Atallah, M., and Herrman, R. (2025). Efficient circuits for leaf-separable state preparation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.11227. Under review at Springer Quantum Information Processing.

5. Wilkie, A., DeLise, A., Del Real, A., Herrman, R., and Ostrowski, J. (2025). Learning Feasible Quantum States for Quadratic Constrained Binary Optimization Problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.02590. Under review at IJOC.

6. Atallah, M., Ostrowski, J., & Herrman, R. (2025). A mixed-integer program for circuit execution time minimization with precedence constraints. arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.09268. 

7. Herrman, R., & Wisdom, G. (2024). Leaky forcing and resilience of Cartesian products of K_n. arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.03178. Under review at Discrete Optimization

8. Wilkie, A., Ostrowski, J., & Herrman, R. An angle rounding parameter initialization technique for ma-QAOA (2024). arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.10743. 

9. Herrman, R. and Smith, Stephen G.Z. "Extending Grundy Domination to k-Grundy Domination."

10. Herrman, R. "Relating the multi-angle quantum approximate optimization algorithm and continuous-time quantum walks on dynamic graphs".

11.  Carlotti, A. and Herrman, R.  “Uniform bounds for non-negativity of the diffusion game”.