Machine learning phases of matter

Alexey Uvarov, Andrey Kardashin, Jacob Biamonte

Machine learning has emerged as a promising approach to unveil properties of many-body systems. Recently proposed as a tool to classify phases of matter, the approach relies on classical simulation methods---such as Monte Carlo---which are known to experience an exponential slowdown when simulating certain quantum systems. To overcome this slowdown while still leveraging machine learning, we propose a variational quantum algorithm which merges quantum simulation and quantum machine learning to classify phases of matter. Our classifier is directly fed labeled states recovered by the variational quantum eigensolver algorithm, thereby avoiding the data-reading slowdown experienced in many applications of quantum enhanced machine learning. We propose families of variational ansatz states that are inspired directly by tensor networks. This allows us to use tools from tensor network theory to explain properties of the phase diagrams the presented quantum algorithm recovers. Finally, we propose a majority vote quantum classifier built from a nearest-neighbor (checkerboard) quantum neural network. This classifier is successfully trained to recognize phases of matter with 99% accuracy for the transverse field Ising model and 94% accuracy for the $XXZ$ model. These findings suggest that a merger between quantum simulation and quantum enhanced machine learning offers a fertile ground to develop computational insights into quantum systems.

Vladislav Chertenkov, Evgeni Burovski, Щур Лев Николаевич

Dong-Ling Deng, Xiaopeng Li, S. Das Sarma

Machine learning, the core of artificial intelligence and data science, is a very active field, with vast applications throughout science and technology. Recently, machine learning techniques have been adopted to tackle intricate quantum many-body problems and phase transitions. In this work, the authors construct exact mappings from exotic quantum states to machine learning network models. This work shows for the first time that the restricted Boltzmann machine can be used to study both symmetry-protected topological phases and intrinsic topological order. The exact results are expected to provide a substantial boost to the field of machine learning of phases of matter.

Louis-François Arsenault, O. Anatole von Lilienfeld, Andrew J. Millis

Humberto Munoz-Bauza, Firas Hamze, Helmut G. Katzgraber

Si Jiang, Sirui Lu, Dong-Ling Deng

Classifying different phases and the transitions between them is a major task in condensed matter physics. Machine learning, which has achieved dramatic success recently in a broad range of artificial intelligence applications, may bring an unprecedented perspective for this challenging task. In this paper, we study the robustness of this intriguing machine-learning approach to adversarial perturbations, with a focus on supervised learning scenarios. We find that typical phase classifiers based on deep neural networks are extremely vulnerable to adversarial examples: adding a tiny amount of carefully-crafted noises, which are imperceptible to human eyes and ineffective to traditional methods, into the original legitimate data obtained from numerical simulations or real experiments will cause the classifiers to make incorrect predictions at a notably high confidence level. Our results reveal a novel vulnerability aspect in applying machine learning techniques to condensed matter physics, which provides a valuable guidance for both theoretical and experimental future studies along this direction.