Open quantum systems have been shown to host a plethora of exotic dynamical phases. Measurement-induced entanglement phase transitions in monitored quantum systems are a striking example of this phenomena. However, naive realizations of such phase transitions requires an exponential number of repetitions of the experiment which is practically unfeasible on large systems. Recently, it has been proposed that these phase transitions can be probed locally via entangling reference qubits and studying their purification dynamics. In this work, we leverage modern machine learning tools to devise a neural network decoder to determine the state of the reference qubits conditioned on the measurement outcomes. We show that the entanglement phase transition manifests itself as a stark change in the learnability of the decoder function. We study the complexity and scalability of this approach in both Clifford and Haar random circuits and discuss how it can be utilized to detect entanglement phase transitions in generic experiments.
Open quantum systems have been shown to host a plethora of exotic dynamical phases. Measurement-induced entanglement phase transitions in monitored quantum systems are a striking example of this phenomena. However, naive realizations of such phase transitions requires an exponential number of repetitions of the experiment which is practically unfeasible on large systems. Recently, it has been proposed that these phase transitions can be probed locally via entangling reference qubits and studying their purification dynamics. In this work, we leverage modern machine learning tools to devise a neural network decoder to determine the state of the reference qubits conditioned on the measurement outcomes. We show that the entanglement phase transition manifests itself as a stark change in the learnability of the decoder function. We study the complexity and scalability of this approach in both Clifford and Haar random circuits and discuss how it can be utilized to detect entanglement phase transitions in generic experiments.
Monitored quantum circuits host a rich variety of exotic non-equilibrium phases. Among the most representative examples are measurement-induced phase transitions between distinct area-law entangled states. However, because these transitions are characterized by specific entanglement quantities such as mutual information or topological entanglement entropy that are nonlinear functionals of the density matrix, their experimental observation requires multiple identical quantum trajectories via post-selection, which becomes exponentially unfeasible for large systems. Here, we leverage modern machine learning tools to address this challenge. We devise a neural network architecture combining a convolutional neural network with an attention mechanism, and use raw measurement outcomes directly as input to classify trivial, long-range entangled, and symmetry-protected topological phases. We show that the system's relaxation to a steady-state phase manifests as a sharp convergence in the classifier's accuracy, entirely bypassing the need for quantum state reconstruction. We systematically study the performance of our network as a function of sample size, input data, spatial and temporal constraints, and system size scalability. Our results demonstrate that this approach is robust and post-selection free, offering a practical pathway for experimentally probing measurement-induced phases.
Measurement-induced entanglement (MIE) captures how local measurements generate long-range quantum correlations and drive dynamical phase transitions in many-body systems. Yet estimating MIE experimentally remains challenging: direct evaluation requires extensive post-selection over measurement outcomes, raising the question of whether MIE is accessible with only polynomial resources. We address this challenge by reframing MIE detection as a data-driven learning problem that assumes no prior knowledge of state preparation. Using measurement records alone, we train a neural network in a self-supervised manner to predict the uncertainty metric for MIE--the gap between upper and lower bounds of the average post-measurement bipartite entanglement. Applied to random circuits with one-dimensional all-to-all connectivity, our method reveals a learnability transition with increasing circuit depth: below a threshold the MIE can be effectively learned with resources that grow only polynomially with system size, whereas above it the required resources grow exponentially. This computational phase transition coincides with the breakdown of efficient classical simulation of the underlying quantum state. We further observe signatures of this transition on current noisy quantum devices. These results highlight the power of data-driven approaches for learning MIE and delineate the practical limits of its classical learnability.
Abstract We explore the interplay of quantum computing and machine learning to advance experimental protocols for observing measurement-induced phase transitions (MIPTs) in quantum devices. In particular, we focus on trapped ion monitored circuits and apply the cross entropy benchmark recently introduced by Li et al (2023 Phys. Rev. Lett. 130 220404), which can mitigate the post-selection problem. By doing so, we reduce the number of projective measurements—the sample complexity—required per random circuit realization, which is a critical limiting resource in real devices. Since these projective measurement outcomes form a classical probability distribution, they are suitable for learning with a standard machine learning generative model. In this paper, we use a recurrent neural network to learn a representation of the measurement record for a native trapped-ion MIPT, and show that using this generative model can substantially reduce the number of measurements required to accurately estimate the cross entropy. This illustrates the potential of combining quantum computing and machine learning to overcome practical challenges in realizing quantum experiments.
Measurement-induced phase transitions (MIPTs) epitomize new intellectual pursuits inspired by the advent of quantum hardware and the emergence of discrete and programmable circuit dynamics. Nevertheless, experimentally observing this transition is challenging, often requiring non-scalable protocols, such as post-selecting measurement trajectories or relying on classical simulations. We introduce a scalable data-centric approach using Quantum Attention Networks (QuAN) to detect MIPTs without requiring post-selection or classical simulation. Applying QuAN to dynamics generated by Haar random unitaries and weak measurements, we first demonstrate that it can pinpoint MIPTs using their interpretation as "learnability" transitions, where it becomes possible to distinguish two different initial states from the measurement record, locating a phase boundary consistent with exact results. Motivated by sample efficiency, we consider an alternative "phase recognition" task-classifying weak- and strong-monitoring data generated from a single initial state. We find QuAN can provide an efficient and noise-tolerant upper bound on the MIPT based on measurement data alone by coupling Born-distribution-level (inter-trajectory) and dynamical (temporal) attention. In particular, our inspection of the inter-trajectory scores of the model trained with minimal sample size processing test data confirmed that QuAN paid special attention to the tail of the distribution of the Born probabilities at early times. This reassuring interpretation of QuAN's learning implies the phase-recognition approach can meaningfully signal MIPT in an experimentally accessible manner. Our results lay the groundwork for observing MIPT on near-term quantum hardware and highlight attention-based architectures as powerful tools for learning complex quantum dynamics.
Entanglement is a key property in the development of quantum technologies and in the study of quantum many-body simulations. However, entanglement measurement typically requires quantum full-state tomography (FST). Here we present a neural network-assisted protocol for measuring entanglement in equilibrium and non-equilibrium states of local Hamiltonians. Instead of FST, it can learn comprehensive entanglement quantities from single-qubit or two-qubit Pauli measurements, such as Rényi entropy, partially-transposed (PT) moments, and coherence. It is also exciting that our neural network is able to learn the future entanglement dynamics using only single-qubit traces from the previous time. In addition, we perform experiments using a nuclear spin quantum processor and train an adoptive neural network to study entanglement in the ground and dynamical states of a one-dimensional spin chain. Quantum phase transitions (QPT) are revealed by measuring static entanglement in ground states, and the entanglement dynamics beyond measurement time is accurately estimated in dynamical states. These precise results validate our neural network. Our work will have a wide range of applications in quantum many-body systems, from quantum phase transitions to intriguing non-equilibrium phenomena such as quantum thermalization.
Monitored random circuits, consisting of alternating layers of entangling two-qubit gates and projective single-qubit measurements applied to some fraction p of the qubits, have been a topic of recent interest. In particular, the resulting steady state exhibits a phase transition from highly correlated states with "volume-law" entanglement at p<p_{c} to localized states with "area-law" entanglement at p>p_{c}. It is hard to access this transition experimentally, as it cannot be seen at the ensemble level. Naively, to observe it one must repeat the experiment until the set of measurement results repeats itself, with likelihood that is exponentially small in the number of measurements. To overcome this issue, we present a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm which creates a matrix product state (MPS) based "unitary mirror" of the projected circuit. Polynomial-sized tensor networks can represent quantum states with area-law entanglement, and so the unitary mirror can well approximate the experimental state above p_{c} but fails exponentially below it. The breaking of this mirror can thus pinpoint the critical point. We outline the algorithm and how such results would be obtained. We present a bound on the maximum entanglement entropy of any given state that is well represented by an MPS, and from the bound suggest how the volume-law phase can be bounded. We consider whether the entanglement could similarly be bounded from below where the MPS fails. Finally, we present numerical results for small qubit numbers and for monitored circuits with random Clifford gates.