  The theoretical analysis of the Adiabatic Quantum Computation protocol
presents several challenges resulting from the difficulty of simulating, with
classical resources, the unitary dynamics of a large quantum device. We present
here a variational approach to substantially alleviate this problem in many
situations of interest. Our approach is based on the time-dependent Variational
Monte Carlo method, in conjunction with a correlated and time-dependent Jastrow
ansatz. We demonstrate that accurate results can be obtained in a variety of
problems, ranging from the description of defect generation through a dynamical
phase transition in 1D to the complex dynamics of frustrated spin-glass
problems both on fully-connected and Chimera graphs.
