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arXiv:2012.07063

Ground States of Quantum Many Body Lattice Models via Reinforcement Learning

Willem Gispen, Austen Lamacraft

Published Dec 13, 2020• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We introduce reinforcement learning (RL) formulations of the problem of finding the ground state of a many-body quantum mechanical model defined on a lattice. We show that stoquastic Hamiltonians - those without a sign problem - have a natural decomposition into stochastic dynamics and a potential representing a reward function. The mapping to RL is developed for both continuous and discrete time, based on a generalized Feynman-Kac formula in the former case and a stochastic representation of the Schrödinger equation in the latter. We discuss the application of this mapping to the neural representation of quantum states, spelling out the advantages over approaches based on direct representation of the wavefunction of the system.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2012.07063

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We introduce reinforcement learning (RL) formulations of the problem of finding the ground state of a many-body quantum mechanical model defined on a lattice. We show that stoquastic Hamiltonians - those without a sign problem - have a natural decomposition into stochastic dynamics and a potential representing a reward function. The mapping to RL is developed for both continuous and discrete time, based on a generalized Feynman-Kac formula in the former case and a stochastic representation of the Schrödinger equation in the latter. We discuss the application of this mapping to the neural representation of quantum states, spelling out the advantages over approaches based on direct representation of the wavefunction of the system.
Finding the ground state of a quantum mechanical system can be formulated as an optimal control problem. In this formulation, the drift of the optimally controlled process is chosen to match the distribution of paths in the Feynman--Kac (FK) representation of the solution of the imaginary time Schr\"odinger equation. This provides a variational principle that can be used for reinforcement learning of a neural representation of the drift. Our approach is a drop-in replacement for path integral Monte Carlo, learning an optimal importance sampler for the FK trajectories. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach to several problems of one-, two-, and many-particle physics.
The computation of electronic excited states and real-time quantum dynamics of many-fermion systems is among the most promising applications of near-term quantum computing. In this work, we generalize the reinforcement learning contracted quantum eigensolver (RL-CQE), previously developed for ground-state problems, to electronic excited states and real-time quantum dynamics, in which a deep Q-network agent adaptively selects the two-body operators at each iteration, yielding more compact ansätze and improved robustness with respect to critical hyperparameters. A key feature of the algorithm is a scalable state representation based on the ACSE residuals, whose dimension grows with the one-particle basis but remains independent of the number of targeted excited states. We also verify the equivalence of sign-free qubit operators in the excited-state setting, extending a result previously established for ground-state problems. Our RL-CQE for time evolution derives from a constant-scaling ansatz that represents the wave function with a fixed number of unitary transformations independent of simulation time ttt, enabled by the shared unitary structure of the purified ensemble treatment of excited states. Benchmarks on chemical systems demonstrate chemical accuracy with minimal operator counts across a range of bond lengths.
This paper investigates the application of quantum-inspired algorithms to the field of reinforcement learning (RL). Traditional RL methods often struggle with exploration challenges and can be computationally expensive, particularly in complex environments. We propose a novel RL algorithm that leverages concepts from quantum mechanics, specifically superposition and entanglement, to address these limitations. The core idea is to represent states, actions, and rewards using quantum-inspired representations, allowing the agent to explore the environment more efficiently and potentially converge to optimal policies faster. This work presents a detailed formulation of the algorithm, including the mathematical framework and key considerations for implementation. The potential benefits of this approach, including improved exploration and reduced computational complexity, are discussed. The algorithm is designed to iteratively refine its policy based on simulated quantum measurements, aiming to minimize the expected return. The exploration strategy is guided by the inherent probabilistic nature of quantum states, leading to a more diverse and potentially faster learning process. Further research is warranted to fully explore the capabilities and limitations of this approach across various RL benchmark problems.
Abstract Quantum many-body control is a central milestone en route to harnessing quantum technologies. However, the exponential growth of the Hilbert space dimension with the number of qubits makes it challenging to classically simulate quantum many-body systems and, consequently, to devise reliable and robust optimal control protocols. Here we present a framework for efficiently controlling quantum many-body systems based on reinforcement learning (RL). We tackle the quantum-control problem by leveraging matrix product states (1) for representing the many-body state and (2) as part of the trainable machine learning architecture for our RL agent. The framework is applied to prepare ground states of the quantum Ising chain, including states in the critical region. It allows us to control systems far larger than neural-network-only architectures permit, while retaining the advantages of deep learning algorithms, such as generalizability and trainable robustness to noise. In particular, we demonstrate that RL agents are capable of finding universal controls, of learning how to optimally steer previously unseen many-body states and of adapting control protocols on the fly when the quantum dynamics is subject to stochastic perturbations. Furthermore, we map our RL framework to a hybrid quantum–classical algorithm that can be performed on noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices and test it under the presence of experimentally relevant sources of noise.
The quantum many-body problem is ultimately a curse of dimensionality: the state of a system with many particles is determined by a function with many dimensions, which rapidly becomes difficult to efficiently store, evaluate and manipulate numerically. On the other hand, modern machine learning models like deep neural networks can express highly correlated functions in extremely large-dimensional spaces, including those describing quantum mechanical problems. We show that if one represents wavefunctions as a stochastically generated set of sample points, the problem of finding ground states can be reduced to one where the most technically challenging step is that of performing regression-a standard supervised learning task. In the stochastic representation the (anti)symmetric property of fermionic/bosonic wavefunction can be used for data augmentation and learned rather than explicitly enforced. We further demonstrate that propagation of an ansatz towards the ground state can then be performed in a more robust and computationally scalable fashion than traditional variational approaches allow.
The advantage of quantum computers over classical computers fuels the recent trend of developing machine learning algorithms on quantum computers, which can potentially lead to breakthroughs and new learning models in this area. The aim of our study is to explore deep quantum reinforcement learning (RL) on photonic quantum computers, which can process information stored in the quantum states of light. These quantum computers can naturally represent continuous variables, making them an ideal platform to create quantum versions of neural networks. Using quantum photonic circuits, we implement Q learning and actor-critic algorithms with multilayer quantum neural networks and test them in the grid world environment. Our experiments show that 1) these quantum algorithms can solve the RL problem and 2) compared to one layer, using three layer quantum networks improves the learning of both algorithms in terms of rewards collected. In summary, our findings suggest that having more layers in deep quantum RL can enhance the learning outcome.