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arXiv:2207.02851 · European Mathematical Society Magazine

Tensor networks in machine learning

Richik Sengupta, Soumik Adhikary, Ivan Valer'evich Oseledets, Jacob Biamonte

Published Oct 5, 2022• 24 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

A tensor network is a type of decomposition used to express and approximate large arrays of data.A given dataset, quantum state, or higher-dimensional multilinear map is factored and approximated by a composition of smaller multilinear maps.This is reminiscent to how a Boolean function might be decomposed into a gate array: this represents a special case of tensor decomposition, in which the tensor entries are replaced by 0, 1 and the factorisation becomes exact.The associated techniques are called tensor network methods: the subject developed independently in several distinct fields of study, which have more recently become interrelated through the language of tensor networks.The tantamount questions in the field relate to expressability of tensor networks and the reduction of computational overheads.A merger of tensor networks with machine learning is natural.On the one hand, machine learning can aid in determining a factorisation of a tensor network approximating a data set.On the other hand, a given tensor network structure can be viewed as a machine learning model.Herein the tensor network parameters are adjusted to learn or classify a data-set.In this survey we review the basics of tensor networks and explain the ongoing effort to develop the theory of tensor networks in machine learning.1

DOI
10.4171/mag/101

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A tensor network is a type of decomposition used to express and approximate large arrays of data.A given dataset, quantum state, or higher-dimensional multilinear map is factored and approximated by a composition of smaller multilinear maps.This is reminiscent to how a Boolean function might be decomposed into a gate array: this represents a special case of tensor decomposition, in which the tensor entries are replaced by 0, 1 and the factorisation becomes exact.The associated techniques are called tensor network methods: the subject developed independently in several distinct fields of study, which have more recently become interrelated through the language of tensor networks.The tantamount questions in the field relate to expressability of tensor networks and the reduction of computational overheads.A merger of tensor networks with machine learning is natural.On the one hand, machine learning can aid in determining a factorisation of a tensor network approximating a data set.On the other hand, a given tensor network structure can be viewed as a machine learning model.Herein the tensor network parameters are adjusted to learn or classify a data-set.In this survey we review the basics of tensor networks and explain the ongoing effort to develop the theory of tensor networks in machine learning.1
Tensor decomposition techniques have shown great successes in machine learning and data science by extending classical algorithms based on matrix factorization to multi-modal and multi-way data. However, there exist many tensor decomposition models~(CP, Tucker, Tensor Train, etc.) and the rank of such a decomposition is typically a collection of integers rather than a unique number, making model and hyper-parameter selection a tedious and costly task. At the same time, tensor network methods are powerful tools developed in the physics community which have recently shown their potential for machine learning applications and offer a unifying view of the various tensor decomposition models. In this paper, we leverage the tensor network formalism to develop a generic and efficient adaptive algorithm for tensor learning. Our method is based on a simple greedy approach optimizing a differentiable loss function starting from a rank one tensor and successively identifying the most promising tensor network edges for small rank increments. Our algorithm can adaptively identify tensor network structures with small number of parameters that effectively optimize the objective function from data. The framework we introduce is very broad and encompasses many common tensor optimization problems. Experiments on tensor decomposition and tensor completion tasks with both synthetic and real world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Tensor networks can compactly represent high-dimensional data in the form of low-rank tensor decompositions, which helps capture complex structures and correlations within the data. However, their inherently multilinear nature limits their potential as universal approximators. To address this limitation, tensor networks are combined with classical neural network layers, introducing nonlinear elements to enhance the model’s expressive power. The Hybrid Tensor Networks (HTN) system encompasses two prevalent tensor network configurations, Matrix Product States and Tree Tensor Networks, which facilitates the adaptable design of models customized for particular machine learning applications. This framework has been validated on classification and image reconstruction tasks, demonstrating its potential to handle complex data structures and its applicability within the machine learning field. Employing this approach, the goal is to establish a foundation for future research on hybrid quantum-classical models, thereby opening up avenues for the realm of quantum machine learning.
Tensor networks were developed in the context of many-body physics as compressed representations of multiparticle quantum states. These representations mitigate the exponential complexity of many-body systems by capturing only the most relevant dependencies. Due to the formal similarity between quantum entanglement and statistical correlations, tensor networks have recently been integrated in machine learning, operating both as alternative learning architectures and as decompositions of components of neural networks. The expectation is that the theoretical understanding of tensor networks developed within quantum many-body physics leads to novel methods that offer advantages in terms of computational efficiency, explainability, or privacy. Here we review the use of tensor networks in the context of machine learning, providing a critical assessment of the state of the art, the potential advantages, and the challenges that must be overcome.
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High-dimensional data arise naturally in many areas of science and engineering, including machine learning, signal processing, computational physics, and statistics. Such data are often represented as tensors, multi-dimensional generalizations of matrices. While tensors provide a natural representation for multi-modal structure, their direct manipulation quickly becomes challenging as the order grows: the number of parameters increases exponentially, and algebraic expressions involving many indices become difficult to interpret and implement. Tensor networks (TNs) provide an effective framework for addressing these challenges. Originally introduced by Penrose and developed extensively in quantum physics, the graphical language of tensor networks encodes contractions as edges in a graph, reducing notational overhead and revealing structural properties obscured by index notation. Despite the central role of high-dimensional tensors in modern machine learning and numerical analysis, tensor network diagrams remain underutilized outside quantum computing, partly due to the lack of a self-contained mathematical reference accessible to a broad technical audience. This manuscript provides a self-contained guide to tensor networks and their use in tensor algebra. We present the main operations on tensors, contractions, products, and reshaping through, graphical notation, and show how classical tensor decompositions and related computations are naturally expressed in this framework. We also illustrate how tensor networks simplify the derivation of gradients and the manipulation of high-dimensional probability distributions. Throughout, we show that the diagrammatic approach yields genuinely shorter and more transparent proofs of classical identities, rank bounds, and gradient formulas that would otherwise require laborious index manipulation.
Many complex chemical problems encoded in terms of physics-based models become computationally intractable for traditional numerical approaches due to their unfavorable scaling with increasing molecular size. Tensor decomposition techniques can overcome such challenges by decomposing unattainably large numerical representations of chemical problems into smaller, tractable ones. In the first two decades of this century, algorithms based on such tensor factorizations have become state-of-the-art methods in various branches of computational chemistry, ranging from molecular quantum dynamics to electronic structure theory and machine learning. Here, we consider the role that tensor decomposition schemes have played in expanding the scope of computational chemistry. We relate some of the most prominent methods to their common underlying tensor network formalisms, providing a unified perspective on leading tensor-based approaches in chemistry and materials science.