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arXiv:2507.10287 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Grassmann variational Monte Carlo with neural wave functions

Douglas Hendry, Alessandro Sinibaldi, Giuseppe Carleo

Published Jul 24, 2026• 2 citations
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Abstract

Excited states play a central role in determining the physical properties of quantum matter, yet their accurate computation in many-body systems remains a formidable challenge for numerical methods. While neural quantum states have delivered outstanding results for ground-state problems, extending their applicability to excited states has faced limitations, including instability in dense spectra and reliance on symmetry constraints or penalty-based formulations. In this work, we rigorously formalize the framework introduced by Pfau et al.~\cite{pfau2024accurate} in terms of Grassmann geometry of the Hilbert space. This allows us to generalize the Stochastic Reconfiguration method for the simultaneous optimization of multiple variational wave functions, and to introduce the multidimensional versions of operator variances and overlaps. We validate our approach on the Heisenberg quantum spin model on the square lattice, achieving highly accurate energies and physical observables for a large number of excited states.

DOI
10.1103/l8mr-567g

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Excited states play a central role in determining the physical properties of quantum matter, yet their accurate computation in many-body systems remains a formidable challenge for numerical methods. While neural quantum states have delivered outstanding results for ground-state problems, extending their applicability to excited states has faced limitations, including instability in dense spectra and reliance on symmetry constraints or penalty-based formulations. In this work, we rigorously formalize the framework introduced by Pfau et al.~\cite{pfau2024accurate} in terms of Grassmann geometry of the Hilbert space. This allows us to generalize the Stochastic Reconfiguration method for the simultaneous optimization of multiple variational wave functions, and to introduce the multidimensional versions of operator variances and overlaps. We validate our approach on the Heisenberg quantum spin model on the square lattice, achieving highly accurate energies and physical observables for a large number of excited states.
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Determining quantum excited states is crucial across physics and chemistry but presents significant challenges for variational methods, primarily due to the need to enforce orthogonality to lower-energy states, often requiring state-specific optimization, penalty terms, or specialized ansatz constructions. We introduce a novel variational principle that overcomes these limitations, enabling the \textit{simultaneous} determination of multiple low-energy excited states. The principle is based on minimizing the trace of the inverse overlap matrix multiplied by the Hamiltonian matrix, Tr(S−1H)\mathrm{Tr}(\mathbf{S}^{-1}\mathbf{H})Tr(S−1H), constructed from a set of \textit{non-orthogonal} variational states {∣ψi⟩}\{|ψ_i\rangle\}{∣ψi​⟩}. Here, Hij=⟨ψi∣H∣ψj⟩\mathbf{H}_{ij} = \langleψ_i | H | ψ_j\rangleHij​=⟨ψi​∣H∣ψj​⟩ and Sij=⟨ψi∣ψj⟩\mathbf{S}_{ij} = \langleψ_i | ψ_j\rangleSij​=⟨ψi​∣ψj​⟩ are the elements of the Hamiltonian and overlap matrices, respectively. This approach variationally optimizes the entire low-energy subspace spanned by {∣ψi⟩}\{|ψ_i\rangle\}{∣ψi​⟩} without explicit orthogonality constraints or penalty functions. We demonstrate the power and generality of this method across diverse physical systems and variational ansatzes: calculating the low-energy spectrum of 1D Heisenberg spin chains using matrix product states, finding vibrational spectrum of Morse potential using quantics tensor trains for real-space wavefunctions, and determining excited states for 2D fermionic Hubbard model with variational quantum circuits. In all applications, the method accurately and simultaneously obtains multiple lowest-lying energy levels and their corresponding states, showcasing its potential as a unified and flexible framework for calculating excited states on both classical and quantum computational platforms.
We examine applicability of the valence bond basis correlator product state ansatz, equivalent to the restricted Boltzmann machine quantum artificial neural-network ansatz, and variational Monte Carlo method for direct optimization of excited energy states to study properties of strongly correlated and frustrated quantum systems. The energy eigenstates are found by stochastic minimization of the variational function for the energy eigenstates, which allows direct optimization of particular energy state without knowledge of the lower energy states. This approach combined with numerous tensor network or artificial neural-network ansatz wave functions then allows further insight into quantum phases and phase transitions in various strongly correlated models by considering properties of these systems beyond the ground-state properties. Also, the method is in general applicable to any dimension and has no sign instability. An example that we consider is the square lattice ${J}_{1}\ensuremath{-}{J}_{2}$ antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model. The model is one of the most studied models in frustrated quantum magnetism since it is closely related to the disappearance of the antiferromagnetic order in the high-Tc superconducting materials and there is still no agreement about the properties of the system in the highly frustrated regime near J2/J1=0.5{J}_{2}/{J}_{1}=0.5J2​/J1​=0.5. For the ${J}_{1}\ensuremath{-}{J}_{2}$ model, we write the variational ansatz in terms of the two site correlators and in the valence bond basis and calculate the lowest energy eigenstates in the highly frustrated regime near J2/J1=0.5{J}_{2}/{J}_{1}=0.5J2​/J1​=0.5 where the system has a paramagnetic phase. We find that our results are in good agreement with previously obtained results, which confirms applicability of the method to study frustrated spin systems.
We propose a framework for the design and analysis of optimization algorithms in variational quantum Monte Carlo, drawing on geometric insights into the corresponding function space. The framework translates infinite-dimensional optimization dynamics into tractable parameter-space algorithms through a Galerkin projection onto the tangent space of the variational ansatz. This perspective unifies existing methods such as stochastic reconfiguration and Rayleigh-Gauss-Newton, provides connections to classic function-space algorithms, and motivates the derivation of novel algorithms with geometrically principled hyperparameter choices. We validate our framework with numerical experiments demonstrating its practical relevance through the accurate estimation of ground-state energies for several prototypical models in condensed matter physics modeled with neural network wavefunctions.
Neural-network wave functions in Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) have achieved great success in accurately representing both ground and excited states. However, achieving sufficient numerical accuracy in state overlaps requires increasing the number of Monte Carlo samples, and consequently the computational cost, with the number of states. We present a nearly constant sample-size approach, Multi-State Importance Sampling (MSIS), that leverages samples from all states to estimate pairwise overlap. To efficiently evaluate all states for all samples, we introduce Excited Pfaffians. Inspired by Hartree-Fock, this architecture represents many states within a single neural network. Excited Pfaffians also serve as generalized wave functions, allowing a single model to represent multi-state potential energy surfaces. On the carbon dimer, we match the O(Ns4)O(N_s^4)O(Ns4​)-scaling natural excited states while training >200×>200\times>200× faster and modeling 50% more states. Our favorable scaling enables us to be the first to use neural networks to find all distinct energy levels of the beryllium atom. Finally, we demonstrate that a single wave function can represent excited states across various molecules.
Artificial neural networks have been recently introduced as a general ansatz to represent many-body wave functions. In conjunction with variational Monte Carlo calculations, this ansatz has been applied to find Hamiltonian ground states and their energies. Here, we provide extensions of this method to study excited states, a central task in several many-body quantum calculations. First, we give a prescription that allows us to target eigenstates of a (nonlocal) symmetry of the Hamiltonian. Second, we give an algorithm to compute low-lying excited states without symmetries. We demonstrate our approach with both restricted Boltzmann machines and feed-forward neural networks. Results are shown for the one-dimensional spin-1/2 Heisenberg model, and for the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model. When comparing to exact results, we obtain good agreement for a large range of excited-states energies. Interestingly, we find that deep networks typically outperform shallow architectures for high-energy states.