Siddhant Midha, Yifan F. Zhang, Daniel Malz, Dmitry A. Abanin, Sarang Gopalakrishnan (Apr 24 2026).
Abstract: Belief propagation has recently emerged as a powerful framework for evaluating tensor networks in higher dimensions, combining computational efficiency with provable analytical guarantees. In this work, we develop the first end-to-end theory of tensor network belief propagation for a class of projected entangled pair states satisfying \emphstrong injectivity. We show that when the injectivity parameter exceeds a constant threshold, BP fixed points can be found efficiently, and a cluster-corrected BP algorithm computes physical quantities to
1/poly(N) error in
poly(N) time for an
N qubit system. We identify a striking phenomenon we term \emphalgorithmic locality: local perturbations of the tensor network affect the BP fixed point with an influence decaying rapidly with distance. As a result, updates to the fixed point after a local perturbation can be carried out using only local recomputation. Moreover, through the cluster expansion, this locality extends to observables, implying that local expectation values can be approximated from local data with controlled accuracy. Our results provide the first rigorous guarantee for the effectiveness of tensor-network belief propagation on a wide class of many-body states, bridging a gap between widely used numerical practice and provable algorithmic performance.
