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arXiv:2312.11941

Entanglement transition in deep neural quantum states

Giacomo Passetti, Dante Marvin Kennes

Published Jan 1, 2023• 0 citations
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Abstract

Despite the huge theoretical potential of neural quantum states, their use in describing generic, highly-correlated quantum many-body systems still often poses practical difficulties. Customized network architectures are under active investigation to address these issues. For a guided search of suited network architectures a deepened understanding of the link between neural network properties and attributes of the physical system one is trying to describe, is imperative. Drawing inspiration from the field of machine learning, in this work we show how information propagation in deep neural networks impacts the physical entanglement properties of deep neural quantum states. In fact, we link a previously identified information propagation phase transition of a neural network to a similar transition of entanglement in neural quantum states. With this bridge we can identify optimal neural quantum state hyperparameter regimes for representing area as well as volume law entangled states. The former are easily accessed by alternative methods, such as tensor network representations, at least in low physical dimensions, while the latter are challenging to describe generally due to their extensive quantum entanglement. This advance of our understanding of network configurations for accurate quantum state representation helps to develop effective representations to deal with volume-law quantum states, and we apply these findings to describe the ground state (area law state) vs. the excited state (volume law state) properties of the prototypical next-nearest neighbor spin-1/2 Heisenberg model.

DOI
10.18154/rwth-2024-02718

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Despite the huge theoretical potential of neural quantum states, their use in describing generic, highly-correlated quantum many-body systems still often poses practical difficulties. Customized network architectures are under active investigation to address these issues. For a guided search of suited network architectures a deepened understanding of the link between neural network properties and attributes of the physical system one is trying to describe, is imperative. Drawing inspiration from the field of machine learning, in this work we show how information propagation in deep neural networks impacts the physical entanglement properties of deep neural quantum states. In fact, we link a previously identified information propagation phase transition of a neural network to a similar transition of entanglement in neural quantum states. With this bridge we can identify optimal neural quantum state hyperparameter regimes for representing area as well as volume law entangled states. The former are easily accessed by alternative methods, such as tensor network representations, at least in low physical dimensions, while the latter are challenging to describe generally due to their extensive quantum entanglement. This advance of our understanding of network configurations for accurate quantum state representation helps to develop effective representations to deal with volume-law quantum states, and we apply these findings to describe the ground state (area law state) vs. the excited state (volume law state) properties of the prototypical next-nearest neighbor spin-1/2 Heisenberg model.
Modern deep learning has enabled unprecedented achievements in various domains. Nonetheless, employment of machine learning for wave function representations is focused on more traditional architectures such as restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) and fully connected neural networks. In this Letter, we establish that contemporary deep learning architectures, in the form of deep convolutional and recurrent networks, can efficiently represent highly entangled quantum systems. By constructing tensor network equivalents of these architectures, we identify an inherent reuse of information in the network operation as a key trait which distinguishes them from standard tensor network-based representations, and which enhances their entanglement capacity. Our results show that such architectures can support volume-law entanglement scaling, polynomially more efficiently than presently employed RBMs. Thus, beyond a quantification of the entanglement capacity of leading deep learning architectures, our analysis formally motivates a shift of trending neural-network-based wave function representations closer to the state-of-the-art in machine learning.
We study whether neural quantum states based on multilayer feed-forward networks can find ground states which exhibit volume-law entanglement entropy. As a testbed, we employ the paradigmatic Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model. We find that both shallow and deep feed-forward networks require an exponential number of parameters in order to represent the ground state of this model. This demonstrates that sufficiently complicated quantum states, although being physical solutions to relevant models and not pathological cases, can still be difficult to learn to the point of intractability at larger system sizes. Hence, the variational neural network approach offers no benefits over exact diagonalization methods in this case. This highlights the importance of further investigations into the physical properties of quantum states amenable to an efficient neural representation.
As neural networks are known to efficiently represent classes of tensor-network states as well as volume-law-entangled states, identifying which properties determine the representational capabilities of neural quantum states (NQS) remains an open question. We construct NQS representations of ground states of medium-mass atomic nuclei, which typically exhibit significant entanglement and non-stabilizerness, to study their performance in relation to the quantum complexity of the target state. Leveraging a second-quantized formulation of NQS tailored for nuclear-physics applications, we perform calculations in active orbital spaces using a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), a prototypical NQS ansatz. For a fixed number of configurations, we find that states with larger non-stabilizerness are systematically harder to learn, as evidenced by reduced accuracy. This finding suggests that non-stabilizerness is a primary factor governing the compression and representational efficiency of RBMs in entangled regimes, and motivates extending these studies to more sophisticated network architectures.
Part of the challenge for quantum many-body problems comes from the difficulty of representing large-scale quantum states, which in general requires an exponentially large number of parameters. Neural networks provide a powerful tool to represent quantum many-body states. An important open question is what characterizes the representational power of deep and shallow neural networks, which is of fundamental interest due to the popularity of deep learning methods. Here, we give a proof that, assuming a widely believed computational complexity conjecture, a deep neural network can efficiently represent most physical states, including the ground states of many-body Hamiltonians and states generated by quantum dynamics, while a shallow network representation with a restricted Boltzmann machine cannot efficiently represent some of those states.One of the challenges in studies of quantum many-body physics is finding an efficient way to record the large system wavefunctions. Here the authors present an analysis of the capabilities of recently-proposed neural network representations for storing physically accessible quantum states.
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.
We introduce Neural Tensor Network States (νννTNS), a variational many-body wave-function ansatz that integrates deep neural networks with tensor-network architectures. In the νννTNS framework, a neural network serves as a disentangler of the wave-function, transforming the physical degrees of freedom into renormalized variables with much less entanglement. The renormalized state is then efficiently encoded by a back-flow tensor network. This construction yields a compact yet highly expressive representation of strongly correlated quantum states. Using convolutional neural networks combined with matrix product states as a concrete implementation, we obtain state-of-the-art variational energies for the spin-1/21/21/2 J1J_1J1​-J2J_2J2​ Heisenberg model on the square lattice at the highly frustrated point J2/J1=0.5J_2/J_1=0.5J2​/J1​=0.5, for systems up to 20×2020\times 2020×20 with periodic boundary conditions. Finite-size scaling of spin, dimer, and plaquette correlations exhibits power-law decay without magnetic or valence-bond long-range order, consistent with a gapless quantum spin-liquid ground state at that point.This νννTNS framework is flexible and naturally extensible to other neural and tensor-network structures, offering a general platform for investigating strongly correlated quantum many-body systems.