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arXiv:2602.01981 · New Journal of Physics

Putting machine learning to the test in a quantum many-body system

Yilun Gao, Alberto Rodríguez, Rudolf A. Römer

Published Sep 1, 2026• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract Quantum many-body systems pose a formidable computational challenge due to the exponential growth of their Hilbert space. While deep learning (DL) has shown promise as an alternative paradigm, many applications in these systems are still to mature further, beyond the proof-of-concept stages of energy estimation at the lower end of the spectrum. Here, we extend DL beyond this frontier by extensively testing HubbardNet , a deep neural network architecture for the Bose–Hubbard model. Pushing improvements in the optimizer and learning rates, and introducing physics-informed output activations that can resolve extremely small wave-function amplitudes, we achieve ground-state energy errors reduced by orders of magnitude and wave-function fidelities exceeding 99%. We further assess physical relevance by analyzing generalized inverse participation ratios and multifractal dimensions for ground and excited states in one and two dimensions, demonstrating that optimized DL models reproduce localization, delocalization, and multifractality trends across the spectrum. Crucially, these qualitative predictions remain robust across four decades of the interaction strength, e.g. spanning across superfluid, Mott-insulating, as well as quantum chaotic regimes. Together, these results suggest DL as a viable qualitative predictor of many-body structure, complementing the quantitative strengths of exact diagonalization and tensor-network methods.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/aea58f

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Abstract Quantum many-body systems pose a formidable computational challenge due to the exponential growth of their Hilbert space. While deep learning (DL) has shown promise as an alternative paradigm, many applications in these systems are still to mature further, beyond the proof-of-concept stages of energy estimation at the lower end of the spectrum. Here, we extend DL beyond this frontier by extensively testing HubbardNet , a deep neural network architecture for the Bose–Hubbard model. Pushing improvements in the optimizer and learning rates, and introducing physics-informed output activations that can resolve extremely small wave-function amplitudes, we achieve ground-state energy errors reduced by orders of magnitude and wave-function fidelities exceeding 99%. We further assess physical relevance by analyzing generalized inverse participation ratios and multifractal dimensions for ground and excited states in one and two dimensions, demonstrating that optimized DL models reproduce localization, delocalization, and multifractality trends across the spectrum. Crucially, these qualitative predictions remain robust across four decades of the interaction strength, e.g. spanning across superfluid, Mott-insulating, as well as quantum chaotic regimes. Together, these results suggest DL as a viable qualitative predictor of many-body structure, complementing the quantitative strengths of exact diagonalization and tensor-network methods.
The study of interacting quantum many-body systems is constrained by the exponential growth of the Hilbert space with system size, which limits both numerical simulations and theoretical understanding. This thesis explores how the interplay between disorder and interactions shapes localization and ergodicity in quantum many-body systems, using the exact diagonalization method, and how machine learning can serve as an alternative approach for studying these systems. We first investigate the many-body localization problem in a one-dimensional SU(2)-invariant random antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain using exact and sparse matrix diagonalization methods. By analyzing energy level gap-ratio statistics, participation ratio, entanglement entropy and the entanglement spectral parameter as a function of disorder strength under di!erent random coupling distributions, we identify clear qualitative di!erences from the widely studied random field Heisenberg chain. For system sizes up to L = 24, signatures of localized behaviour are much less pronounced than in the case of the random field model. Motivated by the limitations of conventional numerical methods, we examine machine learning as a scalable paradigm for many-body physics. Using the Bose- Hubbard model in one and two dimensions as a benchmark, we test HUBBARDNET, a deep neural network architecture, by replacing standard stochastic gradient descent with adaptive moment estimation (ADAM), adjusting the learning rate for improved optimization, and introducing physics-informed output activations that can resolve extremely small wave-function amplitudes. This approach yields ground-state energy errors reduced by orders of magnitude and wave function fidelities exceeding 99%, remaining robust across four decades of interaction strength and over superfluid, Mott-insulating, and quantum chaotic regimes. Beyond energy prediction, the trained models accurately reproduce generalized inverse participation ratios and multifractal dimensions for ground and excited states, capturing localization, delocalization, and multifractality across the spectrum, with excited-state training explicitly guided by fractal dimensions that encode the multifractal properties of the wave functions.
We present a deep neural network (DNN) -based model (HubbardNet) to variationally find the ground-state and excited-state wave functions of the one-dimensional and two-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model. Using this model for a square lattice with MMM sites, we obtain the energy spectrum as an analytical function of the on-site Coulomb repulsion, UUU, and the total number of particles, NNN, from a single training. This approach bypasses the need to solve a new Hamiltonian for each different set of values (U,N)(U,N)(U,N) and generalizes well even for out-of-distribution (U,N)(U,N)(U,N). Using HubbardNet, we identify the two ground-state phases of the Bose-Hubbard model (Mott insulator and superfluid). We show that the DNN-parametrized solutions are in excellent agreement with results from the exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian, and it outperforms exact diagonalization in terms of computational scaling. These advantages suggest that our model is promising for efficient and accurate computation of exact phase diagrams of many-body lattice Hamiltonians.
Characterizing the ground state properties of quantum systems is fundamental to capturing their behavior but computationally challenging. Recent advances in AI have introduced novel approaches, with diverse machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models proposed for this purpose. However, the necessity and specific role of DL models in these tasks remain unclear, as prior studies often employ varied or impractical quantum resources to construct datasets, resulting in unfair comparisons. To address this, we systematically benchmark DL models against traditional ML approaches across three families of Hamiltonian, scaling up to 127 qubits in three crucial ground-state learning tasks while enforcing equivalent quantum resource usage. Our results reveal that ML models often achieve performance comparable to or even exceeding that of DL approaches across all tasks. Furthermore, a randomization test demonstrates that measurement input features have minimal impact on DL models' prediction performance. These findings challenge the necessity of current DL models in many quantum system learning scenarios and provide valuable insights into their effective utilization.
One of the main reasons why the physics of quantum many-body systems is hard \nlies in the curse of dimensionality: \nThe number of states of such systems increases exponentially with the number of degrees of freedom involved. \nAs a result, computations for realistic systems become intractable, \nand even numerical methods are limited to comparably small system sizes. \nMany efforts in modern physics research are therefore concerned with \nfinding efficient representations of quantum states and \nclever approximations schemes that would allow them to characterize physical systems of interest. \n \nMeanwhile, Deep Learning (DL) has solved many non-scientific problems \nthat have been unaccessible to conventional methods for a similar reason. \nThe concept underlying DL is to extract knowledge from data \nby identifying patterns and regularities. \nThe remarkable success of DL has excited many physicists about \nthe prospect of leveraging its power to solve intractable problems in physics. \nAt the same time, DL turned out to be an interesting complex many-body \nproblem in itself. \nIn contrast to its widespread empirical applications, \nthe theoretical foundation of DL is strongly underdeveloped. \nIn particular, as long as its decision-making process and result interpretability remain opaque, \nDL can not claim the status of a scientific tool. \n \nIn this thesis, I explore the interface between DL and quantum many-body physics, \nand investigate DL both as a tool and as a subject of study. \nThe first project presented here is a theory-based study of \na fundamental open question about the role of width and the number of parameters in deep neural networks. \nIn this work, we consider a DL setup for the image recognition task on standard benchmarking datasets. \nWe combine controlled experiments with a theoretical analysis, including analytical calculations for a toy model. \nThe other three works focus on the application of Restricted Boltzmann Machines as generative models \nfor the task of wavefunction reconstruction from measurement data on a quantum many-body system. \nFirst, we implement this approach as a software package, making it available as a tool for experimentalists. \nFollowing the idea that physics problems can be used to characterize DL tools, \nwe then use our extensive knowledge of this setup to conduct a systematic study of \nhow the RBM complexity scales with the complexity of the physical system. \nFinally, in a follow-up study we focus on the effects of parameter pruning techniques \non the RBM and its scaling behavior.
Machine learning has shown significant breakthroughs in quantum science, where in particular deep neural networks exhibited remarkable power in modeling quantum many-body systems. Here, we explore how the capacity of data-driven deep neural networks in learning the dynamics of physical observables is correlated with the scrambling of quantum information. We train a neural network to find a mapping from the parameters of a model to the evolution of observables in random quantum circuits for various regimes of quantum scrambling and test its generalization and extrapolation capabilities in applying it to unseen circuits. Our results show that a particular type of recurrent neural network is extremely powerful in generalizing its predictions within the system size and time window that it has been trained on for both, localized and scrambled regimes. These include regimes where classical learning approaches are known to fail in sampling from a representation of the full wave function. Moreover, the considered neural network succeeds in extrapolating its predictions beyond the time window and system size that it has been trained on for models that show localization, but not in scrambled regimes.
Abstract This paper presents a general neural network framework for solving quantum few-body systems, extending prior methods to handle diverse particle masses, interaction types, and system configurations. Our architecture, which combines an adaptive step size with the Metropolis-Adjusted Langevin Algorithm for Monte Carlo sampling, accurately approximates the ground-state wave functions of systems featuring harmonic confinement, Gaussian two-body interactions, and including three-body forces. In ten-particle systems, it achieves lower relative energy errors (with respect to the reference values) than previous machine-learning methods. Leveraging GPU-accelerated computation, the method scales favorably with system size while maintaining robust convergence, reduced hyperparameter sensitivity, and stable training. Beyond accurate energy estimation, the model captures spatial distributions and correlation structures, offering physical insights about inter-particle structure. By unifying applicability across identical and nonidentical particles, the proposed approach establishes a versatile computational tool for exploring complex few-body quantum systems, with significant implications for advancing computational models in few-body quantum systems.