  We present Counterdiabatic Reverse Annealing, a novel quantum annealing
protocol that extends the range of application of reverse annealing to the
previously inaccessible short-time domain. This is achieved by exploiting
approximate counterdiabatic driving expanded in low-order nested commutators.
In this work, we offer a comparative study of the performance of this new
technique to that of unassisted reverse annealing in terms of metrics such as
the ground-state fidelity and the time to solution. We provide a quantitative
measure of the energetic cost of counterdiabatic reverse annealing and show
that significant improvements are possible even using local counterdiabatic
potentials, paving the way toward the experimental implementation in near-term
quantum devices.
