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arXiv:2509.19006

BatchTNMC: Efficient sampling of two-dimensional spin glasses using tensor network Monte Carlo

Tao Chen, Jingtong Zhang, Liu, Jing, Youjin Deng, Pan Zhang

Published Sep 23, 2025• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Efficient sampling of two-dimensional statistical physics systems remains a central challenge in computational statistical physics. Traditional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, including cluster algorithms, provide only partial solutions, as their efficiency collapses for large systems in the presence of frustration and quenched disorder. The recently proposed Tensor Network Monte Carlo (TNMC) method offers a promising alternative, yet its original implementation suffers from inefficiencies due to the lack of scalable parallel sampling. In this work, we introduce BatchTNMC, a GPU-optimized and parallelized implementation of TNMC tailored for large-scale simulations of two-dimensional spin glasses. By leveraging batch processing and parallel sampling across multiple disorder realizations, our implementation achieves speedups of up to five orders of magnitude compared with the original serial scheme. Benchmarking on two-dimensional spin glasses demonstrates dramatic gains in efficiency: for instance, on a single GPU, BatchTNMC concurrently produces 1000 uncorrelated and unbiased samples across 1000 disorder realizations on $1024\times 1024$ lattices in just 3.3 hours, with an acceptance probability of 37%. These results establish BatchTNMC as a scalable and powerful computational framework for the study of two-dimensional disordered spin glass systems.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2509.19006

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Efficient sampling of two-dimensional statistical physics systems remains a central challenge in computational statistical physics. Traditional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, including cluster algorithms, provide only partial solutions, as their efficiency collapses for large systems in the presence of frustration and quenched disorder. The recently proposed Tensor Network Monte Carlo (TNMC) method offers a promising alternative, yet its original implementation suffers from inefficiencies due to the lack of scalable parallel sampling. In this work, we introduce BatchTNMC, a GPU-optimized and parallelized implementation of TNMC tailored for large-scale simulations of two-dimensional spin glasses. By leveraging batch processing and parallel sampling across multiple disorder realizations, our implementation achieves speedups of up to five orders of magnitude compared with the original serial scheme. Benchmarking on two-dimensional spin glasses demonstrates dramatic gains in efficiency: for instance, on a single GPU, BatchTNMC concurrently produces 1000 uncorrelated and unbiased samples across 1000 disorder realizations on 1024×10241024\times 10241024×1024 lattices in just 3.3 hours, with an acceptance probability of 37%. These results establish BatchTNMC as a scalable and powerful computational framework for the study of two-dimensional disordered spin glass systems.
Sampling equilibrium configurations of three-dimensional (3D) spin glasses with quenched disorder remains a fundamental challenge in statistical physics. The rugged energy landscape, pronounced critical slowing down, and intrinsic ergodicity breaking render standard Monte Carlo methods severely inefficient, particularly for large systems at low temperatures. In this Letter, we introduce the tensor-network Markov-chain Monte Carlo (TNMCMC) approach to address the issue. By formulating large-scale collective updates via tensor-network contractions on 2D lattice slices, TNMCMC yields unbiased samples of the Boltzmann distribution while substantially reducing autocorrelation times relative to conventional MCMC approaches. Numerical benchmarks on 3D spin glasses demonstrate that the method systematically mitigates critical slowing down. Furthermore, application to three- and four-state 3D Potts models shows that TNMCMC can traverse the exponential free-energy barriers of first-order phase transitions that typically hinder local MC updates. These results establish TNMCMC as a promising numerical framework capable of addressing important 3D problems in statistical physics and beyond, such as the precise computation of low-temperature thermodynamic properties of three-dimensional spin glasses and the decoding of quantum error-correcting codes with a three-dimensional topology.
Disordered lattice spin systems are crucial in both theoretical and applied physics. However, understanding their properties poses significant challenges to Monte Carlo simulations. In this work, we investigate the two-dimensional random-bond Ising model using the recently proposed tensor network Monte Carlo (TNMC) method. This method generates biased samples from conditional probabilities computed via tensor network contractions and corrects the bias using the Metropolis scheme. Consequently, the proposals provided by tensor networks function as block updates for Monte Carlo simulations. Through extensive numerical experiments, we demonstrate that TNMC simulations can be performed on lattices as large as $1024\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}1024$ spins with moderate computational resources, a substantial increase from the previous maximum size of $64\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}64$ in Markov-chain Monte Carlo. Notably, we observe an almost complete absence of critical slowing down, enabling the efficient collection of unbiased samples and averaging over a large number of random realizations of bond disorders. We successfully pinpoint the multicritical point along the Nishimori line with significant precision and accurately determined the bulk and surface critical exponents. Our findings suggest that TNMC is a highly efficient algorithm for exploring disordered and frustrated systems in two dimensions.
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), and Tensor Networks (TN) are two powerful frameworks for numerically investigating many-body systems, each offering distinct advantages. MCMC, with its flexibility and theoretical consistency, is well-suited for simulating arbitrary systems by sampling. TN, on the other hand, provides a powerful tensor-based language for capturing the entanglement properties intrinsic to many-body systems, offering a universal representation of these systems. In this work, we leverage the computational strengths of TN to design a versatile cluster MCMC sampler. Specifically, we propose a general framework for constructing tensor-based cluster MCMC methods, enabling arbitrary cluster updates by utilizing TNs to compute the distributions required in the MCMC sampler. Our framework unifies several existing cluster algorithms as special cases and allows for natural extensions. We demonstrate our method by applying it to the simulation of the two-dimensional Edwards-Anderson Model and the three-dimensional Ising Model. This work is dedicated to the memory of Prof. David Draper.
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful tool for sampling from complex probability distributions. Despite its versatility, MCMC often suffers from strong autocorrelation and the negative sign problem, leading to slowing down the convergence of statistical error. We propose a novel MCMC formulation based on tensor network representations to reduce the population variance and mitigate these issues systematically. By introducing stochastic projectors into the tensor network framework and employing Markov chain sampling, our method eliminates the systematic error associated with low-rank approximation in tensor contraction while maintaining the high accuracy of the tensor network method. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on the two-dimensional Ising model, achieving an exponential reduction in statistical error with increasing bond dimension cutoff. Furthermore, we address the sign problem in systems with negative weights, showing significant improvements in average signs as bond dimension cutoff increases. The proposed framework provides a robust solution for accurate statistical estimation in complex systems, paving the way for broader applications in computational physics and beyond.
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We introduce a Metropolis-Hastings Markov chain for Boltzmann distributions of classical spin systems. It relies on approximate tensor network contractions to propose correlated collective updates at each step of the evolution. We present benchmark computations for a wide variety of instances of the two-dimensional Ising model, including ferromagnetic, antiferromagnetic, (fully) frustrated and Edwards-Anderson spin glass instances, and we show that, with modest computational effort, our Markov chain achieves sizeable acceptance rates, even in the vicinity of critical points. In each of the situations we have considered, the Markov chain compares well with other Monte Carlo schemes such as the Metropolis or Wolff’s algorithm: equilibration times appear to be reduced by a factor that varies between 40 40 and 2000 2000 , depending on the model and the observable being monitored. We also present an extension to three spatial dimensions, and demonstrate that it exhibits fast equilibration for finite ferro- and antiferromagnetic instances. Additionally, and although it is originally designed for a square lattice of finite degrees of freedom with open boundary conditions, the proposed scheme can be used as such, or with slight modifications, to study triangular lattices, systems with continuous degrees of freedom, matrix models, a confined gas of hard spheres, or to deal with arbitrary boundary conditions.