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arXiv:2205.12250 · Journal of Machine Learning

Efficient Anti-Symmetrization of a Neural Network Layer by Taming the Sign Problem

Nilin Abrahamsen, Lin Lin

Published Sep 23, 2023• 0 citations
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Abstract

Explicit antisymmetrization of a neural network is a potential candidate for a universal function approximator for generic antisymmetric functions, which are ubiquitous in quantum physics. However, this procedure is a priori factorially costly to implement, making it impractical for large numbers of particles. The strategy also suffers from a sign problem. Namely, due to near-exact cancellation of positive and negative contributions, the magnitude of the antisymmetrized function may be significantly smaller than before antisymmetrization. We show that the anti-symmetric projection of a two-layer neural network can be evaluated efficiently, opening the door to using a generic anti-symmetric layer as a building block in anti-symmetric neural network Ansatzes. This approximation is effective when the sign problem is controlled, and we show that this property depends crucially the choice of activation function under standard Xavier/He initialization methods. As a consequence, using a smooth activation function requires rescaling of the neural network weights compared to standard initializations.

DOI
10.4208/jml.230703

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Explicit antisymmetrization of a neural network is a potential candidate for a universal function approximator for generic antisymmetric functions, which are ubiquitous in quantum physics. However, this procedure is a priori factorially costly to implement, making it impractical for large numbers of particles. The strategy also suffers from a sign problem. Namely, due to near-exact cancellation of positive and negative contributions, the magnitude of the antisymmetrized function may be significantly smaller than before antisymmetrization. We show that the anti-symmetric projection of a two-layer neural network can be evaluated efficiently, opening the door to using a generic anti-symmetric layer as a building block in anti-symmetric neural network Ansatzes. This approximation is effective when the sign problem is controlled, and we show that this property depends crucially the choice of activation function under standard Xavier/He initialization methods. As a consequence, using a smooth activation function requires rescaling of the neural network weights compared to standard initializations.
Motivated by applications to the simulation of quantum many-body systems by neural networks, researchers have suggested several models which are antisymmetric by construction, and can approximate all antisymmetric functions. However, these works either require very high computational complexity to attain universal approximation, or suffer from discontinuities. In this paper, we introduce two antisymmetric ansatzes which do not suffer from these disadvantages. The first is based on a bi-Lipschitz embedding with respect to a naturally defined metric. The second is a modular anti-symmetrizing projection framework based on the frame-averaging methodology. Both approaches yield continuous antisymmetric models which attain universal approximation guarantees with a polynomial complexity in problem size. Moreover, for both approaches, we obtain quantitative approximation results that bound the number of parameters required to approximate Lipschitz antisymmetric functions to a given accuracy εεε. We also provide preliminary experimental evidence suggesting improved performance in learning antisymmetric functions.
A fundamental problem in quantum physics is to encode functions that are completely anti-symmetric under permutations of identical particles. The Barron space consists of high-dimensional functions that can be parameterized by infinite neural networks with one hidden layer. By explicitly encoding the anti-symmetric structure, we prove that the anti-symmetric functions which belong to the Barron space can be efficiently approximated with sums of determinants. This yields a factorial improvement in complexity compared to the standard representation in the Barron space and provides a theoretical explanation for the effectiveness of determinant-based architectures in ab-initio quantum chemistry.
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O~(N2)\widetilde{O}(N^2)O(N2) Representation of General Continuous Anti-symmetric Function
In quantum mechanics, the wave function of fermion systems such as many-body electron systems are anti-symmetric (AS) and continuous, and it is crucial yet challenging to find an ansatz to represent them. This paper addresses this challenge by presenting an O~(N2){\widetilde O}(N^2)O(N2) ansatz based on permutation-equivariant functions. We prove that our ansatz can represent any AS continuous functions, and can accommodate the determinant-based structure proposed by Hutter [14], solving the proposed open problems that O(N){O}(N)O(N) Slater determinants are sufficient to provide universal representation of AS continuous functions. Together, we offer a generalizable and efficient approach to representing AS continuous functions, shedding light on designing neural networks to learn wave functions.
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We present an overview of the method of Neural Quantum States applied to the many-body problem of atomic nuclei. Through the lens of group representation theory, we focus on the problem of constructing neural-network ansätze that respect physical symmetries. We explicitly prove that determinants, which are among the most common methods to build antisymmetric neural-network wave functions, can be understood as the result of a group convolution. We also identify the reason why this construction is so efficient in practice compared to other group convolutional operations. We conclude that group representation theory is a promising avenue to incorporate explicitly symmetries in Neural Quantum States.