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arXiv:2506.12128

Improved Ground State Estimation in Quantum Field Theories via Normalising Flow-Assisted Neural Quantum States

Vishal S. Ngairangbam, Michael Spannowsky, Timur Sypchenko

Published Jun 13, 2025• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We propose a hybrid variational framework that enhances Neural Quantum States (NQS) with a Normalising Flow-based sampler to improve the expressivity and trainability of quantum many-body wavefunctions. Our approach decouples the sampling task from the variational ansatz by learning a continuous flow model that targets a discretised, amplitude-supported subspace of the Hilbert space. This overcomes limitations of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and autoregressive methods, especially in regimes with long-range correlations and volume-law entanglement. Applied to the transverse-field Ising model with both short- and long-range interactions, our method achieves comparable ground state energy errors with state-of-the-art matrix product states and lower energies than autoregressive NQS. For systems up to 50 spins, we demonstrate high accuracy and robust convergence across a wide range of coupling strengths, including regimes where competing methods fail. Our results showcase the utility of flow-assisted sampling as a scalable tool for quantum simulation and offer a new approach toward learning expressive quantum states in high-dimensional Hilbert spaces.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2506.12128

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We propose a hybrid variational framework that enhances Neural Quantum States (NQS) with a Normalising Flow-based sampler to improve the expressivity and trainability of quantum many-body wavefunctions. Our approach decouples the sampling task from the variational ansatz by learning a continuous flow model that targets a discretised, amplitude-supported subspace of the Hilbert space. This overcomes limitations of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and autoregressive methods, especially in regimes with long-range correlations and volume-law entanglement. Applied to the transverse-field Ising model with both short- and long-range interactions, our method achieves comparable ground state energy errors with state-of-the-art matrix product states and lower energies than autoregressive NQS. For systems up to 50 spins, we demonstrate high accuracy and robust convergence across a wide range of coupling strengths, including regimes where competing methods fail. Our results showcase the utility of flow-assisted sampling as a scalable tool for quantum simulation and offer a new approach toward learning expressive quantum states in high-dimensional Hilbert spaces.
Neural quantum states (NQS) have gained prominence in variational quantum Monte Carlo methods in approximating ground-state wavefunctions. Despite their success, they face limitations in optimization, scalability, and expressivity in addressing certain problems. In this work, we propose a quantum-neural hybrid framework that combines parametrized quantum circuits with neural networks to model quantum many-body wavefunctions. This approach combines the efficient sampling and optimization capabilities of autoregressive neural networks with the enhanced expressivity provided by quantum circuits. Numerical simulations demonstrate the scalability and accuracy of the hybrid ansatz in spin systems and quantum chemistry problems. Our results reveal that the hybrid method achieves notably lower relative energy compared to stand-alone NQS. These findings underscore the potential of quantum-neural hybrid methods for tackling challenging problems in quantum many-body simulations.
Artificial neural networks were recently shown to be an efficient representation of highly entangled many-body quantum states. In practical applications, neural-network states inherit numerical schemes used in variational Monte Carlo method, most notably the use of Markov-chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling to estimate quantum expectations. The local stochastic sampling in MCMC caps the potential advantages of neural networks in two ways: (i) Its intrinsic computational cost sets stringent practical limits on the width and depth of the networks, and therefore limits their expressive capacity; (ii) its difficulty in generating precise and uncorrelated samples can result in estimations of observables that are very far from their true value. Inspired by the state-of-the-art generative models used in machine learning, we propose a specialized neural-network architecture that supports efficient and exact sampling, completely circumventing the need for Markov-chain sampling. We demonstrate our approach for two-dimensional interacting spin models, showcasing the ability to obtain accurate results on larger system sizes than those currently accessible to neural-network quantum states.
Recent research has demonstrated the usefulness of neural networks as variational ansatz functions for quantum many-body states. However, high-dimensional sampling spaces and transient autocorrelations confront these approaches with a challenging computational bottleneck. Compared to conventional neural networks, physical-model devices offer a fast, efficient and inherently parallel substrate capable of related forms of Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling. Here, we demonstrate the ability of a neuromorphic chip to represent the ground states of quantum spin models by variational energy minimization. We develop a training algorithm and apply it to the transverse field Ising model, showing good performance at moderate system sizes (N≤10N\leq 10N≤10). A systematic hyperparameter study shows that scalability to larger system sizes mainly depends on sample quality, which is limited by temporal parameter variations on the analog neuromorphic chip. Our work thus provides an important step towards harnessing the capabilities of neuromorphic hardware for tackling the curse of dimensionality in quantum many-body problems.
Accurate ground-state energy calculations remain a central challenge in quantum chemistry due to the exponential scaling of the many-body Hilbert space. Variational Monte Carlo and variational quantum eigensolvers offer promising ansatz optimization approaches but face limitations in convergence as well as hardware constraints. We introduce a particular Selected Configuration Interaction (SCI) algorithm that uses auto-regressive neural networks (ARNNs) to guide subspace expansion for ground-state search. Leveraging the unique properties of ARNNs, our algorithm efficiently constructs compact variational subspaces from learned ground-state statistics, which in turn accelerates convergence to the ground-state energy. Benchmarks on molecular systems demonstrate that ARNN-guided subspace expansion combines the strengths of neural-network representations and classical subspace methods, providing a scalable framework for classical and hybrid quantum-classical algorithms.
Abstract Neural quantum states (NQS) have emerged as powerful tools for simulating many-body quantum systems, but their practical use is often hindered by limitations of current sampling techniques. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods suffer from slow mixing and require manual tuning, while autoregressive NQS impose restrictive architectural constraints that complicate the enforcement of symmetries and the construction of determinant-based multi-state wave functions. In this work, we introduce neural importance resampling (NIR), a new sampling algorithm that combines importance resampling with a separately trained autoregressive proposal network. This approach enables efficient and unbiased sampling without constraining the NQS architecture. We demonstrate that NIR supports stable and scalable training, including for multi-state NQS, and mitigates issues faced by MCMC and autoregressive approaches. Numerical experiments on the 2D transverse-field Ising and J 1 – J 2 Heisenberg models show that NIR outperforms MCMC in challenging regimes and yields results competitive with state of the art methods. Our results establish NIR as a robust alternative for sampling in variational NQS algorithms.
Neural quantum states (NQS) provide a flexible and scalable framework for approximating quantum many-body wavefunctions. Among NQS parameterizations, autoregressive models are especially attractive because they enable exact, independent sampling from the Born distribution, avoiding the autocorrelation and mixing issues of Markov chain methods. Yet their optimization remains comparatively underexplored: Adam is a scalable method but ignores function space geometry, while stochastic reconfiguration is principled but costly and numerically fragile in large models. To address this gap, we show that variational energy minimization can be viewed as an advantage policy-gradient problem over the Born distribution, motivating trust-region optimization for NQS training. We introduce Proximal Wavefunction Optimization (PWO), a principled trust-region algorithm that clips probability-ratio changes in the amplitude channel and phase increments in the phase channel. PWO avoids explicit matrix inversion, reuses samples across multiple updates, and combines the scalability of first-order optimization with theoretical guarantees. Across Ising and frustrated J1J_1J1​-J2J_2J2​ one- and two-dimensional spin systems, PWO improves stability and wall-clock convergence over Adam, minSR, and SPRING. Finally, we fine-tune a 1.51.51.5B-parameter RWKV-7 model, demonstrating NQS optimization at a scale over three orders of magnitude beyond prior work.