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In this paper we study the performance of the quantum adiabatic algorithm on random instances of two combinatorial optimization problems, 3-regular 3-XORSAT and 3-regular max-cut. The cost functions associated with these two clause-based optimization problems are similar as they are both defined on 3-regular hypergraphs. For 3-regular 3-XORSAT the clauses contain three variables and for 3-regular max-cut the clauses contain two variables. The quantum adiabatic algorithms we study for these two problems use interpolating Hamiltonians which are amenable to sign-problem free quantum Monte Carlo and quantum cavity methods. Using these techniques we find that the quantum adiabatic algorithm fails to solve either of these problems efficiently, although for different reasons.