We introduce a novel normal form representation of Boolean functions in terms of products of binary matrices, hereafter referred to as the Binary Matrix Product (BMP) representation. BMPs are analogous to the Tensor-Trains (TT) and Matrix Product States (MPS) used, respectively, in applied mathematics and in quantum many-body physics to accelerate computations that are usually inaccessible by more traditional approaches. BMPs turn out to be closely related to Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs), a powerful compressed representation of Boolean functions invented in the late 80s by Bryant that has found a broad range of applications in many areas of computer science and engineering. We present a direct and natural translation of BMPs into Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs), and derive an elementary set of operations used to manipulate and combine BMPs that are analogous to those introduced by Bryant for BDDs. Both BDDs and BMPs are practical tools when the complexity of these representations, as measured by the maximum bond dimension of a BMP (or the accumulated bond dimension across the BMP matrix train) and the number of nodes of a BDD, remains polynomial in the number of bits, $n$. In both cases, controlling the complexity hinges on optimizing the order of the Boolean variables. BMPs offer the advantage that their construction and manipulation rely on simple linear algebra -- a compelling feature that can facilitate the development of open-source libraries that are both more flexible and easier to use than those currently available for BDDs. An initial implementation of a BMP library is available on GitHub, with the expectation that the close conceptual connection to TT and MPS techniques will motivate further development of BMP methods by researchers in these fields, potentially enabling novel applications to classical and quantum computing.
We introduce a novel normal form representation of Boolean functions in terms of products of binary matrices, hereafter referred to as the Binary Matrix Product (BMP) representation. BMPs are analogous to the Tensor-Trains (TT) and Matrix Product States (MPS) used, respectively, in applied mathematics and in quantum many-body physics to accelerate computations that are usually inaccessible by more traditional approaches. BMPs turn out to be closely related to Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs), a powerful compressed representation of Boolean functions invented in the late 80s by Bryant that has found a broad range of applications in many areas of computer science and engineering. We present a direct and natural translation of BMPs into Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs), and derive an elementary set of operations used to manipulate and combine BMPs that are analogous to those introduced by Bryant for BDDs. Both BDDs and BMPs are practical tools when the complexity of these representations, as measured by the maximum bond dimension of a BMP (or the accumulated bond dimension across the BMP matrix train) and the number of nodes of a BDD, remains polynomial in the number of bits, n. In both cases, controlling the complexity hinges on optimizing the order of the Boolean variables. BMPs offer the advantage that their construction and manipulation rely on simple linear algebra -- a compelling feature that can facilitate the development of open-source libraries that are both more flexible and easier to use than those currently available for BDDs. An initial implementation of a BMP library is available on GitHub, with the expectation that the close conceptual connection to TT and MPS techniques will motivate further development of BMP methods by researchers in these fields, potentially enabling novel applications to classical and quantum computing.
Matrix Product States (MPS), also known as Tensor Train (TT) decomposition in mathematics, has been proposed originally for describing an (especially one-dimensional) quantum system, and recently has found applications in various applications such as compressing high-dimensional data, supervised kernel linear classifier, and unsupervised generative modeling. However, when applied to systems which are not defined on one-dimensional lattices, a serious drawback of the MPS is the exponential decay of the correlations, which limits its power in capturing long-range dependences among variables in the system. To alleviate this problem, we propose to introduce long-range interactions, which act as shortcuts, to MPS, resulting in a new model \textit{ Shortcut Matrix Product States} (SMPS). When chosen properly, the shortcuts can decrease significantly the correlation length of the MPS, while preserving the computational efficiency. We develop efficient training methods of SMPS for various tasks, establish some of their mathematical properties, and show how to find a good location to add shortcuts. Finally, using extensive numerical experiments we evaluate its performance in a variety of applications, including function fitting, partition function calculation of 2−d Ising model, and unsupervised generative modeling of handwritten digits, to illustrate its advantages over vanilla matrix product states.
Tensor trains (or Matrix-Product States) are a data structure used in many fields of computer science and physics. They were recently shown to generalise binary decision diagrams when used over the 2-element Galois field, prompting the question of their reducibility in such a context, when the standard approach, over real or complex number, is not amenable to finite fields. We provide here a unique normal form and associated polynomial-time reduction strategy for tensor trains over arbitrary fields. We also show how to directly extract a normal form out of a full tensor, how to get the leading index and value of a normal form, and an upper bound on the size of a fully-reduced tensor train relative to a naive storage of the full tensor. On the one hand, this work strengthens the use of tensor trains as a relevant formal tool. On the other hand, from the perspective of tensor networks, it extends the formalism to more general settings than the well-studied real and complex fields, and crucially provides the first tensor train form with the uniqueness property.
These notes provide an introduction to tensor-network methods in quantum many-body physics, with an emphasis on matrix-product states (MPS). They develop the basic tensor-network language, including graphical notation, virtual indices, bond dimensions, gauge freedom, canonical forms, QR and singular-value decompositions, and the role of entanglement in controlling the efficiency of the representation. The main MPS algorithms are then introduced, including contractions, correlation functions, matrix-product operators, DMRG, and time-evolution methods. The notes also briefly discuss projected entangled-pair states (PEPS) as a higher-dimensional generalization of MPS, together with the basic ideas behind approximate PEPS contraction. Finally, tensor-network representations of mixed states, quantum channels, and Lindblad dynamics are presented, with applications to thermal states and open quantum systems. The presentation is accompanied by short Julia code examples based on ITensor, ITensorMPS, and TensorMixedStates. These notes were written for the 9th Les Houches Summer School on Computational Physics: Open Quantum Systems, held in June 2026.
This article presents a new compressed representation of Boolean functions, called CFLOBDDs (for Context-Free-Language Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams). They are essentially a plug-compatible alternative to BDDs (Binary Decision Diagrams), and hence are useful for representing certain classes of functions, matrices, graphs, relations, and so forth in a highly compressed fashion. CFLOBDDs share many of the good properties of BDDs, but—in the best case—the CFLOBDD for a Boolean function can be exponentially smaller than any BDD for that function . Compared with the size of the decision tree for a function, a CFLOBDD—again, in the best case—can give a double-exponential reduction in size . They have the potential to permit applications to (i) execute much faster and (ii) handle much larger problem instances than has been possible heretofore. We applied CFLOBDDs in quantum-circuit simulation and found that for several standard problems, the improvement in scalability, compared to BDDs, is quite dramatic. With a 15-minute timeout, the number of qubits that CFLOBDDs can handle are 65,536 for Greenberger-Horne-Zellinger, 524,288 for Bernstein-Vazirani, 4,194,304 for Deutsch-Jozsa, and 4,096 for Grover’s algorithm, besting BDDs by factors of 128×, 1,024×, 8,192×, and 128×, respectively.
We focus on symmetries related to matrices and vectors appearing in the simulation of quantum many-body systems. Spin Hamiltonians have special matrix-symmetry properties such as persymmetry. Furthermore, the systems may exhibit physical symmetries translating into symmetry properties of the eigenvectors of interest. Both types of symmetry can be exploited in sparse representation formats such as Matrix Product States (MPS) for the desired eigenvectors. This article summarizes symmetries of Hamiltonians for typical physical systems such as the Ising model and lists resulting properties of the related eigenvectors. Based on an overview of MPS (Tensor Trains or Tensor Chains) and their canonical normal forms, we show how symmetry properties of the vector translate into relations between the MPS matrices and, in turn, which symmetry properties result from relations within the MPS matrices. In this context, we analyse different kinds of symmetries and derive appropriate normal forms for MPS representing these symmetries. Exploiting such symmetries by using these normal forms will lead to a reduction in the number of degrees of freedom in the MPS matrices. This article provides a uniform platform for both well-known and new results which are presented from the (multi-)linear algebra point of view.
We introduce SeeMPS, a Python library dedicated to implementing tensor network algorithms based on the well-known Matrix Product States (MPS) and Quantized Tensor Train (QTT) formalisms. SeeMPS is implemented as a complete finite precision linear algebra package where exponentially large vector spaces are compressed using the MPS/TT formalism. It enables both low-level operations, such as vector addition, linear transformations, and Hadamard products, as well as high-level algorithms, including the approximation of linear equations, eigenvalue computations, and exponentially efficient Fourier transforms. This library can be used for traditional quantum many-body physics applications and also for quantum-inspired numerical analysis problems, such as solving PDEs, interpolating and integrating multidimensional functions, sampling multivariate probability distributions, etc.