Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:2412.15826 · Physical Review Research

Using matrix-product states for time-series machine learning

Joshua B. Moore, Hugo P. Stackhouse, Ben Fulcher, Sahand Mahmoodian

Published Sep 1, 2025• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Matrix-product states (MPS) have proven to be a versatile ansatz for modeling quantum many-body physics. For many applications, and particularly in one-dimension, they capture relevant quantum correlations in many-body wave functions while remaining tractable (polynomial scaling) to store and manipulate on a classical computer. This has motivated researchers to also apply the MPS ansatz to machine learning (ML) problems where capturing complex correlations in datasets is also a key requirement. Here, for the first time, we develop an MPS-based algorithm, MPSTime, for learning a joint probability distribution underlying a time-series dataset, and show how it can be used to tackle important time-series ML problems, including classification and imputation. MPSTime can efficiently learn complicated time-series probability distributions directly from data, requires only moderate maximum MPS bond dimension χ max (with values for our applications ranging between χ max = 20 − 160 ), and can be trained for both classification and imputation tasks under a single logarithmic loss function. Using synthetic and publicly available real-world datasets—spanning applications in medicine, energy, and astronomy—we demonstrate performance competitive with state-of-the-art ML approaches, but with the key advantage of encoding the full joint probability distribution learned from the data, which is useful for analyzing and interpreting its underlying structure. This manuscript is supplemented with the release of a publicly available code package that implements our approach, and can be used to reproduce all presented results. The effectiveness of the MPS-based ansatz for capturing complex correlation structures in time-series data makes it a powerful foundation for tackling challenging time-series analysis problems across science, industry, and medicine.

DOI
10.1103/61h8-8qr5

Related papers

Tensor networks for unsupervised machine learning

Jing Liu, Sujie Li, Jiang Zhang +1 more

Modeling the joint distribution of high-dimensional data is a central task in unsupervised machine learning. In recent years, many interests have been attracted to developing learning models based on tensor networks, which have the advantages of a principle understanding of the expressive power using entanglement properties, and as a bridge connecting classical computation and quantum computation. Despite the great potential, however, existing tensor network models for unsupervised machine learning only work as a proof of principle, as their performance is much worse than the standard models such as restricted Boltzmann machines and neural networks. In this Letter, we present autoregressive matrix product states (AMPS), a tensor network model combining matrix product states from quantum many-body physics and autoregressive modeling from machine learning. Our model enjoys the exact calculation of normalized probability and unbiased sampling. We demonstrate the performance of our model using two applications, generative modeling on synthetic and real-world data, and reinforcement learning in statistical physics. Using extensive numerical experiments, we show that the proposed model significantly outperforms the existing tensor network models and the restricted Boltzmann machines, and is competitive with state-of-the-art neural network models.

arXiv:2106.12974•Physical review. E•Jan 31, 2023•37 citations

Quantum Generative Modeling of Sequential Data with Trainable Token Embedding

Wanda Hou, Miao Li, Yi‐Zhuang You

Abstract Generative models are a class of machine learning models that aim to learn the underlying probability distribution of data. Unlike discriminative models, generative models focus on capturing the data's inherent structure, allowing them to generate new samples that resemble the original data. To fully exploit the potential of modeling probability distributions using quantum physics, a quantum-inspired generative model known as the Born machines have shown great advancements in learning classical and quantum data over matrix product state(MPS) framework. The Born machines support tractable log-likelihood, autoregressive and mask sampling, and have shown outstanding performance in various unsupervised learning tasks. However, much of the current research has been centered on improving the expressive power of MPS, predominantly embedding each token directly by a corresponding tensor index. In this study, we generalize the embedding method into trainable quantum measurement operators that can be simultaneously honed with MPS. Our study indicated that combined with trainable embedding, Born machines can exhibit better performance and learn deeper correlations from the dataset.

•Jan 25, 2024•1 citation

Efficient Generative Modeling with Unitary Matrix Product States Using Riemannian Optimization

Haotong Duan, Zhongming Chen, Ngai Wong

Tensor networks, which are originally developed for characterizing complex quantum many-body systems, have recently emerged as a powerful framework for capturing high-dimensional probability distributions with strong physical interpretability. This paper systematically studies matrix product states (MPS) for generative modeling and shows that unitary MPS, which is a tensor-network architecture that is both simple and expressive, offers clear benefits for unsupervised learning by reducing ambiguity in parameter updates and improving efficiency. To overcome the inefficiency of standard gradient-based MPS training, we develop a Riemannian optimization approach that casts probabilistic modeling as an optimization problem with manifold constraints, and further derive an efficient space-decoupling algorithm. Experiments on Bars-and-Stripes and EMNIST datasets demonstrate fast adaptation to data structure, stable updates, and strong performance while maintaining the efficiency and expressive power of MPS.

arXiv:2603.12026•Mar 12, 2026•0 citations

Realizing Quantum Kernel Models at Scale with Matrix Product State Simulation

Mekena Metcalf, Pablo Andrés-Martí­nez, Nathan Fitzpatrick

Data representation in quantum state space offers an alternative function space for machine learning tasks. However, benchmarking these algorithms at a practical scale has been limited by ineffective simulation methods. We develop a quantum kernel framework using a Matrix Product State (MPS) simulator and employ it to perform a classification task with 165 features and 6400 training data points, well beyond the scale of any prior work. We make use of a circuit ansatz on a linear chain of qubits with increasing interaction distance between qubits. We assess the MPS simulator performance on CPUs and GPUs and, by systematically increasing the qubit interaction distance, we identify a crossover point beyond which the GPU implementation runs faster. We show that quantum kernel model performance improves as the feature dimension and training data increases, which is the first evidence of quantum model performance at scale.

arXiv:2411.09336•International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC)•Nov 17, 2024•3 citations

FastMPS: Revisit Data Parallel in Large-scale Matrix Product State Sampling

Yaojian Chen, Si-Qiu Gong, Lin Gan +5 more

Matrix Product State (MPS) is a versatile tensor network representation widely applied in quantum physics, quantum chemistry, and machine learning, etc. MPS sampling serves as a critical fundamental operation in these fields. As the problems become more complex, the scale of MPS is rapidly increasing. Traditional data parallelism is limited by memory and heavy I/O in large-scale MPS. Model parallelism that can handle large-scale MPS imposes rigid process bindings and lacks scalability. This work proposes Fast-MPS, a multi-level parallel framework for scalable MPS sampling. Our design combines data parallelism across samples with tensor parallelism along bond dimensions. We eliminate memory and I/O pressure through compression and overlapping, and revive data parallel in large-scale MPS sampling. We evaluate our approach on Gaussian Boson Sampling, a representative and demanding application. Fast-MPS achieves over 10x speedup compared to existing simulators, scales to thousands of processes, and enables simulations with 8,176 sites and bond dimension chi = 10^4, significantly outperforming the state of the art. Fast-MPS has demonstrated great potential in high-performance tensor network applications.

arXiv:2512.20064•Dec 23, 2025•0 citations

Comparing Machine‐Learned Matrix Product State as a Wavefunction Ansatz vs. Classifier

Mandira Dey, Debashree Ghosh

ABSTRACT The exact solution of strongly correlated systems is a computationally demanding problem, scaling exponentially with system size. Over the decades, several approximate methods have been developed to address this scaling problem. Among these, matrix product state (MPS) has emerged as physically intuitive and polynomially scaling. Methods such as density matrix renormalization group (DMRG), time evolution block decimation (TEBD), etc., use the underlying MPS wavefunction ansatz to optimize it variationally. MPS can also be utilized as a machine learning model to select the most important electronic configurations, as employed in selected configuration interactions. This work uses machine learning (ML) optimization of MPS wavefunctions to eliminate the need for multiple diagonalizations during the optimization process. We compare the performance of the machine‐learned MPS‐assisted selected configuration interaction approach, often mentioned as a classifier, to the machine‐learned MPS wavefunction ansatz itself. While showing the viability of the machine‐learned MPS ansatz, it is observed that within ML, MPS is best used as a selected configuration interaction.

International Journal of Quantum Chemistry•May 27, 2025•0 citations
Matrix-product states (MPS) have proven to be a versatile ansatz for modeling quantum many-body physics. For many applications, and particularly in one-dimension, they capture relevant quantum correlations in many-body wave functions while remaining tractable (polynomial scaling) to store and manipulate on a classical computer. This has motivated researchers to also apply the MPS ansatz to machine learning (ML) problems where capturing complex correlations in datasets is also a key requirement. Here, for the first time, we develop an MPS-based algorithm, MPSTime, for learning a joint probability distribution underlying a time-series dataset, and show how it can be used to tackle important time-series ML problems, including classification and imputation. MPSTime can efficiently learn complicated time-series probability distributions directly from data, requires only moderate maximum MPS bond dimension χ max (with values for our applications ranging between χ max = 20 − 160 ), and can be trained for both classification and imputation tasks under a single logarithmic loss function. Using synthetic and publicly available real-world datasets—spanning applications in medicine, energy, and astronomy—we demonstrate performance competitive with state-of-the-art ML approaches, but with the key advantage of encoding the full joint probability distribution learned from the data, which is useful for analyzing and interpreting its underlying structure. This manuscript is supplemented with the release of a publicly available code package that implements our approach, and can be used to reproduce all presented results. The effectiveness of the MPS-based ansatz for capturing complex correlation structures in time-series data makes it a powerful foundation for tackling challenging time-series analysis problems across science, industry, and medicine.
Modeling the joint distribution of high-dimensional data is a central task in unsupervised machine learning. In recent years, many interests have been attracted to developing learning models based on tensor networks, which have the advantages of a principle understanding of the expressive power using entanglement properties, and as a bridge connecting classical computation and quantum computation. Despite the great potential, however, existing tensor network models for unsupervised machine learning only work as a proof of principle, as their performance is much worse than the standard models such as restricted Boltzmann machines and neural networks. In this Letter, we present autoregressive matrix product states (AMPS), a tensor network model combining matrix product states from quantum many-body physics and autoregressive modeling from machine learning. Our model enjoys the exact calculation of normalized probability and unbiased sampling. We demonstrate the performance of our model using two applications, generative modeling on synthetic and real-world data, and reinforcement learning in statistical physics. Using extensive numerical experiments, we show that the proposed model significantly outperforms the existing tensor network models and the restricted Boltzmann machines, and is competitive with state-of-the-art neural network models.
Abstract Generative models are a class of machine learning models that aim to learn the underlying probability distribution of data. Unlike discriminative models, generative models focus on capturing the data's inherent structure, allowing them to generate new samples that resemble the original data. To fully exploit the potential of modeling probability distributions using quantum physics, a quantum-inspired generative model known as the Born machines have shown great advancements in learning classical and quantum data over matrix product state(MPS) framework. The Born machines support tractable log-likelihood, autoregressive and mask sampling, and have shown outstanding performance in various unsupervised learning tasks. However, much of the current research has been centered on improving the expressive power of MPS, predominantly embedding each token directly by a corresponding tensor index. In this study, we generalize the embedding method into trainable quantum measurement operators that can be simultaneously honed with MPS. Our study indicated that combined with trainable embedding, Born machines can exhibit better performance and learn deeper correlations from the dataset.
Tensor networks, which are originally developed for characterizing complex quantum many-body systems, have recently emerged as a powerful framework for capturing high-dimensional probability distributions with strong physical interpretability. This paper systematically studies matrix product states (MPS) for generative modeling and shows that unitary MPS, which is a tensor-network architecture that is both simple and expressive, offers clear benefits for unsupervised learning by reducing ambiguity in parameter updates and improving efficiency. To overcome the inefficiency of standard gradient-based MPS training, we develop a Riemannian optimization approach that casts probabilistic modeling as an optimization problem with manifold constraints, and further derive an efficient space-decoupling algorithm. Experiments on Bars-and-Stripes and EMNIST datasets demonstrate fast adaptation to data structure, stable updates, and strong performance while maintaining the efficiency and expressive power of MPS.
Data representation in quantum state space offers an alternative function space for machine learning tasks. However, benchmarking these algorithms at a practical scale has been limited by ineffective simulation methods. We develop a quantum kernel framework using a Matrix Product State (MPS) simulator and employ it to perform a classification task with 165 features and 6400 training data points, well beyond the scale of any prior work. We make use of a circuit ansatz on a linear chain of qubits with increasing interaction distance between qubits. We assess the MPS simulator performance on CPUs and GPUs and, by systematically increasing the qubit interaction distance, we identify a crossover point beyond which the GPU implementation runs faster. We show that quantum kernel model performance improves as the feature dimension and training data increases, which is the first evidence of quantum model performance at scale.
Matrix Product State (MPS) is a versatile tensor network representation widely applied in quantum physics, quantum chemistry, and machine learning, etc. MPS sampling serves as a critical fundamental operation in these fields. As the problems become more complex, the scale of MPS is rapidly increasing. Traditional data parallelism is limited by memory and heavy I/O in large-scale MPS. Model parallelism that can handle large-scale MPS imposes rigid process bindings and lacks scalability. This work proposes Fast-MPS, a multi-level parallel framework for scalable MPS sampling. Our design combines data parallelism across samples with tensor parallelism along bond dimensions. We eliminate memory and I/O pressure through compression and overlapping, and revive data parallel in large-scale MPS sampling. We evaluate our approach on Gaussian Boson Sampling, a representative and demanding application. Fast-MPS achieves over 10x speedup compared to existing simulators, scales to thousands of processes, and enables simulations with 8,176 sites and bond dimension chi = 10^4, significantly outperforming the state of the art. Fast-MPS has demonstrated great potential in high-performance tensor network applications.
ABSTRACT The exact solution of strongly correlated systems is a computationally demanding problem, scaling exponentially with system size. Over the decades, several approximate methods have been developed to address this scaling problem. Among these, matrix product state (MPS) has emerged as physically intuitive and polynomially scaling. Methods such as density matrix renormalization group (DMRG), time evolution block decimation (TEBD), etc., use the underlying MPS wavefunction ansatz to optimize it variationally. MPS can also be utilized as a machine learning model to select the most important electronic configurations, as employed in selected configuration interactions. This work uses machine learning (ML) optimization of MPS wavefunctions to eliminate the need for multiple diagonalizations during the optimization process. We compare the performance of the machine‐learned MPS‐assisted selected configuration interaction approach, often mentioned as a classifier, to the machine‐learned MPS wavefunction ansatz itself. While showing the viability of the machine‐learned MPS ansatz, it is observed that within ML, MPS is best used as a selected configuration interaction.