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arXiv:2308.10934 · Physical Review Research

Simplicity of mean-field theories in neural quantum states

Fabian Ballar Trigueros, Tiago Mendes-Santos, Markus Heyl

Published Jun 10, 2024• 6 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The utilization of artificial neural networks to represent quantum many-body wave functions has garnered significant attention, with enormous recent progress for both ground states and nonequilibrium dynamics. However, quantifying state complexity within this neural quantum states framework remains elusive. In this study, we address this key open question from a complementary point of view: Which states are simple to represent with neural quantum states? Concretely, we show on a general level that ground states of mean-field theories with permutation symmetry require only a limited number of independent neural network parameters. We analytically establish that, in the thermodynamic limit, convergence to the ground state of the fully connected transverse-field Ising model (TFIM), the mean-field Ising model, can be achieved with just one single parameter. Expanding our analysis, we explore the behavior of the one-parameter ansatz under breaking of the permutation symmetry. For that purpose, we consider the TFIM with tunable long-range interactions, characterized by an interaction exponent α . We show analytically that the one-parameter ansatz for the neural quantum state still accurately captures the ground state for a whole range of values for 0≤α≤1 , implying a mean-field description of the model in this regime. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

DOI
10.1103/physrevresearch.6.023261

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The utilization of artificial neural networks to represent quantum many-body wave functions has garnered significant attention, with enormous recent progress for both ground states and nonequilibrium dynamics. However, quantifying state complexity within this neural quantum states framework remains elusive. In this study, we address this key open question from a complementary point of view: Which states are simple to represent with neural quantum states? Concretely, we show on a general level that ground states of mean-field theories with permutation symmetry require only a limited number of independent neural network parameters. We analytically establish that, in the thermodynamic limit, convergence to the ground state of the fully connected transverse-field Ising model (TFIM), the mean-field Ising model, can be achieved with just one single parameter. Expanding our analysis, we explore the behavior of the one-parameter ansatz under breaking of the permutation symmetry. For that purpose, we consider the TFIM with tunable long-range interactions, characterized by an interaction exponent α . We show analytically that the one-parameter ansatz for the neural quantum state still accurately captures the ground state for a whole range of values for 0≤α≤1 , implying a mean-field description of the model in this regime. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Neural network quantum states such as ansatz wave functions have shown a great deal of promise for finding the ground state of spin models. Recently, work has focused on extending this idea to mixed states for simulating the dynamics of open systems. Most approaches so far have used a purification ansatz where a copy of the system Hilbert space is added, which when traced out gives the correct density matrix. Here we instead present an extension of the restricted Boltzmann machine which directly represents the density matrix in Liouville space. This allows the compact representation of states which appear in mean-field theory. We benchmark our approach on two different versions of the dissipative transverse-field Ising model, which show our ansatz is able to compete with other state-of-the-art approaches. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Abstract We consider the Feynman–Kitaev formalism applied to a spin chain described by the transverse-field Ising model. This formalism consists of building a Hamiltonian whose ground state encodes the time evolution of the spin chain at discrete time steps. To find this ground state, variational wave functions parameterised by artificial neural networks—also known as neural quantum states (NQSs)—are used. Our work focuses on assessing, in the context of the Feynman–Kitaev formalism, two properties of NQSs: expressivity (the possibility that variational parameters can be set to values such that the NQS is faithful to the true ground state of the system) and trainability (the process of reaching said values). We find that the considered NQSs are capable of accurately approximating the true ground state of the system, i.e. they are expressive enough ansätze. However, extensive hyperparameter tuning experiments show that, empirically, reaching the set of values for the variational parameters that correctly describe the ground state becomes ever more difficult as the number of time steps increase because the true ground state becomes more entangled, and the probability distribution starts to spread across the Hilbert space canonical basis.
The simulation of interacting many-body quantum systems is a central chal- lenge in condensed matter physics due to the exponential growth of the Hilbert space with system size. In this project, we implement a Neural Network Quantum State (NQS) ansatz based on a Complex Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) to solve for the ground state of the 1D Transverse Field Ising Model (TFIM). Using Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) optimization via Stochastic Reconfiguration (SR), we successfully train the network to approximate the ground state wave function across the paramagnetic-ferromagnetic phase transition. We benchmark our results against Exact Diagonalization (ED) for small systems (N = 12), demonstrating high accuracy in ground state energy estimation. Furthermore, we investigate quantum correlations and order parameters, specifically the transverse magnetization mx and longitudinal spin-spin correlations Czz(r), highlighting the RBM’s ability to capture long-range order and critical behavior near the quantum critical point hx/J = 1.
Neural Quantum States (NQS) are powerful tools used to represent complex quantum many-body states in an increasingly wide range of applications. However, despite their popularity, at present only a rudimentary understanding of their limitations exists. In this work, we investigate the dependence of NQS on the choice of the computational basis, focusing on restricted Boltzmann machines. Considering a family of rotated Hamiltonians corresponding to the paradigmatic transverse-field Ising model, we discuss the properties of ground states responsible for the dependence of NQS performance, namely the presence of ground state degeneracies as well as the uniformity of amplitudes and phases, carefully examining their interplay. We identify that the basis-dependence of the performance is linked to the convergence properties of a cluster or cumulant expansion of multi-spin operators -- providing a framework to directly connect physical, basis-dependent properties, to performance itself. Our results provide insights that may be used to gauge the applicability of NQS to new problems and to identify the optimal basis for numerical computations.
The Transverse Field Ising Model (TFIM) is an important quantum many-body model used to study the competition between spin-spin interactions and quantum fluctuations generated by a transverse field. Due to the exponential growth of the Hilbert space with increasing system size, numerical methods quickly become computationally infeasible motivating the use of approximate approaches. In this work Neural Quantum States were used as a variational method to approximate the ground-state properties of the one-dimensional TFIM. The NQS was represented using a feedforward Neural Network and optimized through Monte Carlo sampling together with stochastic reconfiguration. The implementation was done through the NetKet framework. The obtained results showed stable convergence of the variational energy and good agreement with exact diagonalization for the smaller system. The quantum phase transition was observed through the order parameter and spin-spin correlations. Finite-size effects were also observed when comparing the two system sizes. The smaller system more closely approaches the symmetric cat-like ground-state. In contrast, the larger system tends to remain near one symmetry-broken configuration. As a result, the smaller system showed stronger spin expectation fluctuations and a smoother behavior near the phase transition. The result demonstrates that the NQS approach is a good approximate method in studying the ground-state physics of the one-dimensional TFIM.
Neural quantum states (NQS) have emerged as powerful representations of quantum states with rapidly expanding applications across quantum many-body physics. Yet our understanding of when neural networks can efficiently represent physical quantum states remains limited, in part due to the nonlinear parameterization of NQS, the intricate sign structure of quantum states, and the sensitive dependence on basis choice. We introduce Walshness, a complexity metric of a quantum state which quantifies whether it admits a compact neural-network representation. We rigorously prove that a general quantum many-body state admits an efficient NQS representation if it has bounded Walshness, and vice versa, for various NQS architectures. We provide an algorithm for finding the optimal basis by minimizing the energy of a corresponding classical spin model. This allows us to empirically improve the learnability of various physical quantum states, including ground states of the transverse-field Ising model and mixed-field toric code, often reducing infidelity by orders of magnitude, and generalizes the basis choice given by the well-known Marshall sign rule in frustrated antiferromagnets. Our results provide an intrinsic complexity metric for quantum states with provable connections to their neural-network representability.