Abstract A study of the artificial neural network representation of quantum many-body states is presented. The locality and entanglement properties of states for shallow and deep quantum neural networks are investigated in detail. By introducing the notion of local quasi-product states, for which the locally connected shallow feed-forward neural network states and restricted Boltzmann machine states are special cases, we show that Rényi entanglement entropies of all these states obey the entanglement area law. Besides, we also investigate the entanglement features of deep Boltzmann machine states and show that locality constraints imposed on the neural networks make the states obey the entanglement area law. Finally, as an application, we apply the notion of Rényi entanglement entropy to understand the power of neural networks, and show that image classification problems can be efficiently solved must obey the area law.
Abstract A study of the artificial neural network representation of quantum many-body states is presented. The locality and entanglement properties of states for shallow and deep quantum neural networks are investigated in detail. By introducing the notion of local quasi-product states, for which the locally connected shallow feed-forward neural network states and restricted Boltzmann machine states are special cases, we show that Rényi entanglement entropies of all these states obey the entanglement area law. Besides, we also investigate the entanglement features of deep Boltzmann machine states and show that locality constraints imposed on the neural networks make the states obey the entanglement area law. Finally, as an application, we apply the notion of Rényi entanglement entropy to understand the power of neural networks, and show that image classification problems can be efficiently solved must obey the area law.
Abstract Part of the challenge for quantum many-body problems comes from the difficulty of representing large-scale quantum states, which in general requires an exponentially large number of parameters. Neural networks provide a powerful tool to represent quantum many-body states. An important open question is what characterizes the representational power of deep and shallow neural networks, which is of fundamental interest due to the popularity of deep learning methods. Here, we give a proof that, assuming a widely believed computational complexity conjecture, a deep neural network can efficiently represent most physical states, including the ground states of many-body Hamiltonians and states generated by quantum dynamics, while a shallow network representation with a restricted Boltzmann machine cannot efficiently represent some of those states.
Part of the challenge for quantum many-body problems comes from the difficulty of representing large-scale quantum states, which in general requires an exponentially large number of parameters. Neural networks provide a powerful tool to represent quantum many-body states. An important open question is what characterizes the representational power of deep and shallow neural networks, which is of fundamental interest due to the popularity of deep learning methods. Here, we give a proof that, assuming a widely believed computational complexity conjecture, a deep neural network can efficiently represent most physical states, including the ground states of many-body Hamiltonians and states generated by quantum dynamics, while a shallow network representation with a restricted Boltzmann machine cannot efficiently represent some of those states.One of the challenges in studies of quantum many-body physics is finding an efficient way to record the large system wavefunctions. Here the authors present an analysis of the capabilities of recently-proposed neural network representations for storing physically accessible quantum states.
Variational wave functions offer a practical route around the exponential complexity of many-body Hilbert spaces, but their expressive power is often sharply constrained. Matrix product states, for instance, are efficient but limited to area law entangled states. Neural quantum states (NQS) are widely believed to overcome such limitations, yet little is known about their fundamental constraints. Here we prove that feed-forward neural quantum states acting on n spins with k scalar nonlinearities, under certain analyticity assumptions, obey a bound on entanglement entropy for any subregion: S≤cklog n, for a constant c. This establishes an NQS analog of the area law constraint for matrix product states and rules out volume law entanglement for NQS with O(1) nonlinearities. We demonstrate analytically and numerically that the scaling with n is tight for a wide variety of NQS. Our Letter establishes a fundamental constraint on NQS that applies broadly across different network designs, while reinforcing their substantial expressive power.
Despite the huge theoretical potential of neural quantum states, their use in describing generic, highly-correlated quantum many-body systems still often poses practical difficulties. Customized network architectures are under active investigation to address these issues. For a guided search of suited network architectures a deepened understanding of the link between neural network properties and attributes of the physical system one is trying to describe, is imperative. Drawing inspiration from the field of machine learning, in this work we show how information propagation in deep neural networks impacts the physical entanglement properties of deep neural quantum states. In fact, we link a previously identified information propagation phase transition of a neural network to a similar transition of entanglement in neural quantum states. With this bridge we can identify optimal neural quantum state hyperparameter regimes for representing area as well as volume law entangled states. The former are easily accessed by alternative methods, such as tensor network representations, at least in low physical dimensions, while the latter are challenging to describe generally due to their extensive quantum entanglement. This advance of our understanding of network configurations for accurate quantum state representation helps to develop effective representations to deal with volume-law quantum states, and we apply these findings to describe the ground state (area law state) vs. the excited state (volume law state) properties of the prototypical next-nearest neighbor spin-1/2 Heisenberg model.
One of the main challenges of quantum many-body physics is that the dimensionality of the Hilbert space grows exponentially with the system size, which makes it extremely difficult to solve the Schrodinger equations of the system. But typically, many physical systems have a simplified internal structure which makes the parameters needed to characterize their ground states exponentially smaller. This makes many numerical methods possible in capture the physics of the system. Among these modern numerical techniques, neural networks, which show great power in approximating functions and extracting features of the big data, are now attracting many interests. Neural network representation of quantum many-body states shows great potential in solving some traditionally difficult quantum problems involving large number of freedoms. In this work, we briefly review the progress of using the artificial neural network to build quantum many-body ansatz states. We take Boltzmann machine representation as a prototypical example to illustrate various aspects of neural network representation of quantum many-body states. We first briefly review the classical neural networks, then we illustrate how to use neural networks to represent quantum states and density operators. Some physical properties of the neural network states, including entanglement features, representational power, and the relation with tensor network states, are discussed. For applications, we briefly review the progress of many-body calculating based on neural network states, neural network state approach to tomography, and also the classical simulation of quantum computing based on Boltzmann machine states. At the end of the work, some outlooks and open problems are given.
We study whether neural quantum states based on multilayer feed-forward networks can find ground states which exhibit volume-law entanglement entropy. As a testbed, we employ the paradigmatic Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model. We find that both shallow and deep feed-forward networks require an exponential number of parameters in order to represent the ground state of this model. This demonstrates that sufficiently complicated quantum states, although being physical solutions to relevant models and not pathological cases, can still be difficult to learn to the point of intractability at larger system sizes. Hence, the variational neural network approach offers no benefits over exact diagonalization methods in this case. This highlights the importance of further investigations into the physical properties of quantum states amenable to an efficient neural representation.