Machine learning (ML) can process large sets of data generated from complex systems, which is ideal for classification tasks as often appeared in critical phenomena. Meanwhile ML techniques have been found effective in detecting critical points, or in a broader sense phase separation, and extracting critical exponents. But there are still many unsolved issues with the ML, one of which is the meaning of hidden variables of unsupervised learning. Some say that the hidden variables and the principal component may contain basic information regarding the order parameter of the system of interest, which sounds plausible but lacks evidence. This study aims at searching for evidence supporting the conjecture that the autoencoder's (AE) single latent variable and PCA's first principal component can only serve as signals related to particle density, which happens to be the order parameter of the non-equilibrium DP model. Indeed, in some phase transition (PT) models the order parameter is the particle density, whereas in some PT models it is not. Having conducted a certain degree of random shuffling on the DP configurations, which are then fed to the neural networks as input, we find that AE's single latent variable and PCA's first principal component can indeed represent particle density. It is found that shuffling does affect the size of maximum cluster in the system, which suggests that the second principal component of the PCA is related to the maximal cluster. This has been supported by changes in the correlation length of the transition system with variations in the shuffle ratio.
Machine learning (ML) can process large sets of data generated from complex systems, which is ideal for classification tasks as often appeared in critical phenomena. Meanwhile ML techniques have been found effective in detecting critical points, or in a broader sense phase separation, and extracting critical exponents. But there are still many unsolved issues with the ML, one of which is the meaning of hidden variables of unsupervised learning. Some say that the hidden variables and the principal component may contain basic information regarding the order parameter of the system of interest, which sounds plausible but lacks evidence. This study aims at searching for evidence supporting the conjecture that the autoencoder's (AE) single latent variable and PCA's first principal component can only serve as signals related to particle density, which happens to be the order parameter of the non-equilibrium DP model. Indeed, in some phase transition (PT) models the order parameter is the particle density, whereas in some PT models it is not. Having conducted a certain degree of random shuffling on the DP configurations, which are then fed to the neural networks as input, we find that AE's single latent variable and PCA's first principal component can indeed represent particle density. It is found that shuffling does affect the size of maximum cluster in the system, which suggests that the second principal component of the PCA is related to the maximal cluster. This has been supported by changes in the correlation length of the transition system with variations in the shuffle ratio.
Abstract Machine learning (ML) of phase transitions (PTs) has gradually become an effective approach that enables us to explore the nature of various PTs more promptly in equilibrium and nonequilibrium systems. Unlike equilibrium systems, non-equilibrium systems display more complicated and diverse features because of the extra dimension of time, which is not readily tractable, both theoretically and numerically. The combination of ML and most renowned nonequilibrium model, directed percolation (DP), led to some significant findings. In this study, ML is applied to ( 1 + 1 ) -d, even offspring branching annihilating random walks (BAW), whose universality class is not DP-like. The supervised learning of ( 1 + 1 ) -d BAW via convolutional neural networks (CNN) results in a more accurate prediction of the critical point than the Monte Carlo (MC) simulation for the same system sizes. The dynamic exponent z and spatial correlation length correlation exponent ν ⊥ were also measured and found to be consistent with their respective theoretical values. Furthermore, the unsupervised learning of ( 1 + 1 ) -d BAW via an autoencoder (AE) gives rise to a transition point, which is the same as the critical point. The latent layer of AE, through a single neuron, can be regarded as the order parameter of the system being properly re-scaled. Therefore, we believe that ML has exciting application prospects in reaction-diffusion systems such as BAW and DP.
Machine learning (ML) has been well applied to studying equilibrium phase transition models by accurately predicating critical thresholds and some critical exponents. Difficulty will be raised, however, for integrating ML into nonequilibrium phase transitions. The extra dimension in a given nonequilibrium system, namely time, can greatly slow down the procedure toward the steady state. In this paper we find that by using some simple techniques of ML, non-steady-state configurations of directed percolation (DP) suffice to capture its essential critical behaviors in both (1+1) and (2+1) dimensions. With the supervised learning method, the framework of our binary classification neural networks can identify the phase transition threshold, as well as the spatial and temporal correlation exponents. The characteristic time t_{c}, specifying the transition from active phases to absorbing ones, is also a major product of the learning. Moreover, we employ the convolutional autoencoder, an unsupervised learning technique, to extract dimensionality reduction representations and cluster configurations of (1+1) bond DP. It is quite appealing that such a method can yield a reasonable estimation of the critical point.
Abstract Machine learning has recently achieved remarkable success in studying phase transitions. It is generally believed that the latent variables of unsupervised learning can capture the information related to phase transitions, which is usually achieved through the so-called order parameter. In most models, for instance the Ising, the order parameters are simply the particle number densities. The percolation, the simplest model which can generate a phase transition, however, has a unique order parameter which is not particle number density. In this paper, we use unsupervised learning to study the relationship between particle number density, critical point, and latent variables in the site percolation model. It is found that if the input of learning is the original configuration, then the output of unsupervised learning does not convey any information related to the phase transition. Therefore, the maximum cluster is employed in order to effectively capture the critical point of the model. Unsupervised learning yields reliable results consistent with Monte Carlo simulations. We also propose a method called Fake Finite Size Scaling (FFSS) to calculate the critical value, which improves the accuracy of fitting to a great extent.
Supervised and unsupervised machine-learning-based frameworks have been implemented in the past to classify various dynamical phases of disordered quantum systems using rather sophisticated (highly preprocessed or difficult to generate) input data. In this paper, we begin by questioning the existence of a nonergodic extended phase, namely, the many-body critical (MBC) phase in finite systems of an interacting quasiperiodic system. We find that this phase can be separately detected from the other phases, such as the many-body ergodic (ME) and many-body localized (MBL) phases, in the model through supervised neural networks made for both binary and multiclass classification tasks, utilizing, rather unpreprocessed, eigenvalue spacings and eigenvector probability densities as input features. Moreover, the output of our trained neural networks can also indicate the critical points separating ME, MBC, and MBL phases, which are consistent with the same obtained from other conventional methods. We also employ unsupervised learning techniques, particularly principal component analysis (PCA) of eigenvector probability densities, to investigate how this framework, without any training, captures the, rather unknown, many-body phases (ME, MBL, and MBC) and single-particle phases (delocalized, localized, and critical) of the interacting and noninteracting systems, respectively. Our findings reveal that PCA entropy serves as an effective indicator (order parameter) for detecting phase transitions in the single-particle systems. Moreover, this method proves applicable to many-body systems when the data undergoes a suitable preprocessing. Interestingly, when it comes to the extraction of critical (correlation length) exponents through a finite-size scaling, we find that for single-particle systems, scaling collapse of neural network outputs is obtained using components of inverse participation ratio (IPR) as input data. Remarkably, we observe identical critical exponents as obtained from the scaling collapse of the IPR directly for different single-particle phase transitions. However, the current finite-size scaling approach to the network output cannot reliably extract critical exponents for the many-body system that needs further investigation.
We assess the quality of a set of machine-learning (ML) techniques for the prediction of the phase diagrams of two frustrated 2D Ising models with competing interactions, that feature phase transitions characterized by critical manifolds rather than a single critical point. Using raw Monte Carlo spin configurations generated for random system parameters, we apply principal-component analysis (PCA) and auto-encoders to achieve dimensionality reduction, followed by clustering using the DBSCAN method and a support-vector machine classifier. The resulting estimates for the critical manifolds of both systems are in excellent agreement with available exact results, with the auto-encoders leading to quantitatively superior results. Notably, both the structure of the optimized auto-encoder as well its corresponding dimensionality-reduced and clustered space correlate with fundamental physical characteristics of the systems under consideration, which is useful when \emph{a priori} theoretical insight is unavailable.
We investigate how unsupervised machine-learning methods can characterize the active-absorbing phase transition in the contact process in one and two spatial dimensions. Our analysis focuses on principal component analysis (PCA) and variational autoencoders (VAEs), and we show that direct applications of these methods encounter a central difficulty: contact process configurations are intrinsically positive-definite. In the PCA case, standard centering procedures fail to isolate the order parameter in the leading component. To address this, we augment the data with sign-reversed configurations, creating a balanced dataset with zero mean while preserving the density information required to describe the transition. This preprocessing allows the dominant principal component to recover the order parameter and reproduce the expected finite-size scaling near criticality. For VAEs, we find a related limitation: a fixed Gaussian prior does not provide sufficient latent regularization across the full range of control parameters and system sizes for positive-definite data. We overcome this by adopting a heteroscedastic Gaussian prior that adapts to the control parameter, leading to a substantial improvement in the finite-size scaling of reconstruction-based observables near the critical threshold. Taken together, these results highlight a key lesson: the success of machine learning in phase-transition problems does not rely on algorithmic complexity alone, but on tailoring the representation to respect the physical structure of the system, including its intrinsic constraints and symmetries.