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arXiv:2609.19619

A Restricted Boltzmann Machine with Quantum-State Visible Units

Zhe-Hao Zhang, Yi-Cong Yu, Xiaoming Cai, Hai-Qing Lin

quant-phSubmitted Sep 17, 2026• Announced Sep 18, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

We construct a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) whose visible input is a quantum state rather than a classical configuration. Each hidden unit carries a trainable quantum template prepared by a parametrized circuit and converts its overlap with the input into a feature. Treating quantum states as high-dimensional continuous visible objects creates nontrivial normalization and scaling problems. We regularize the continuous likelihood and derive two controlled high-dimensional limits, yielding a Hopfield-type network with continuous Hilbert-space patterns and a data-augmented Gram likelihood. The resulting algorithms are compact and use trainable circuit-prepared templates as measurement intermediaries between quantum data and classical optimization. Numerical simulations across several many-body systems demonstrate effective quantum-phase recognition and multicomponent feature extraction.

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Restricted Boltzmann machines in physics: concepts, theories and applications

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Abstract A restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) is a two-layer neural-network machine-learning model comprising a visible layer that represents observed data and a hidden layer that captures correlations among the visible units. Rooted in ideas from statistical mechanics, RBMs provide a probabilistic framework for modeling complex, high-dimensional distributions through an energy function and a corresponding Boltzmann distribution. This review offers an accessible introduction to RBMs from a physics-oriented perspective, focusing on their core concepts and training principles. We survey key theoretical developments that interpret RBMs as many-body systems, highlighting their equilibrium/non-equilibrium thermodynamics, learning dynamics, mean-field properties, phase diagrams, and free energy calculation. We further discuss recent applications of RBMs to a range of physics problems, including quantum-mechanical wavefunction representation, statistical-mechanical Boltzmann distribution modeling, and biological protein sequence analysis.

Journal of Physics Communications•Sep 1, 2026•0 citations
We construct a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) whose visible input is a quantum state rather than a classical configuration. Each hidden unit carries a trainable quantum template prepared by a parametrized circuit and converts its overlap with the input into a feature. Treating quantum states as high-dimensional continuous visible objects creates nontrivial normalization and scaling problems. We regularize the continuous likelihood and derive two controlled high-dimensional limits, yielding a Hopfield-type network with continuous Hilbert-space patterns and a data-augmented Gram likelihood. The resulting algorithms are compact and use trainable circuit-prepared templates as measurement intermediaries between quantum data and classical optimization. Numerical simulations across several many-body systems demonstrate effective quantum-phase recognition and multicomponent feature extraction.
We propose a novel quantum model for the restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), in which the visible units remain classical whereas the hidden units are quantized as noninteracting fermions. The free motion of the fermions is parametrically coupled to the classical signal of the visible units. This model possesses a quantum behaviour such as coherences between the hidden units. Numerical experiments show that this fact makes it more powerful than the classical RBM with the same number of hidden units. At the same time, a significant advantage of the proposed model over the other approaches to the Quantum Boltzmann Machine (QBM) is that it is exactly solvable and efficiently trainable on a classical computer: there is a closed expression for the log-likelihood gradient with respect to its parameters. This fact makes it interesting not only as a model of a hypothetical quantum simulator, but also as a quantum-inspired classical machine-learning algorithm.
Quantum computers offer the potential for efficiently sampling from complex probability distributions, attracting increasing interest in generative modeling within quantum machine learning. This surge in interest has driven the development of numerous generative quantum models, yet their trainability and scalability remain significant challenges. A notable example is a quantum restricted Boltzmann machine (QRBM), which is based on the Gibbs state of a parameterized non-commuting Hamiltonian. While QRBMs are expressive, their non-commuting Hamiltonians make gradient evaluation computationally demanding, even on fault-tolerant quantum computers. In this work, we propose a semi-quantum restricted Boltzmann machine (sqRBM), a model designed for classical data that mitigates the challenges associated with previous QRBM proposals. The sqRBM Hamiltonian is commuting in the visible subspace while remaining non-commuting in the hidden subspace. This structure allows us to derive closed-form expressions for both output probabilities and gradients. Leveraging these analytical results, we demonstrate that sqRBMs share a close relationship with classical restricted Boltzmann machines (RBM). Our theoretical analysis predicts that, to learn a given probability distribution, an RBM requires three times as many hidden units as an sqRBM, while both models have the same total number of parameters. We validate these findings through numerical simulations involving up to 100 units. Our results suggest that sqRBMs could enable practical quantum machine learning applications in the near future by significantly reducing quantum resource requirements.
Lately, there has been an extensive state-of-the-art research in Machine Learning methods, due to their important features such as universality in approximations and dimensional reduction. In this way, the present work aims at exploiting these properties of Machine Learning on physical many-body problems, in which a restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) is trained with quantum Monte Carlo data to best represent the ground state of an N spin system under the transverse field Ising model Hamiltonian in one dimension. During the path coursed along the development of this project, we first review classical well-implemented methods such as the single-layer perceptron, multi-layer perceptron for the XOR problem with back-propagation algorithm, discrete Hopfield network for pattern reconstruction, continuous Hopfield network with Simulated Annealing for solving the traveling salesman problem with 10 cities and the Boltzmann machine for feature extraction. Then, we review a few aspects of what is called a Quantum Boltzmann Machine and the basics of the transverse field Ising model. Finally, we train an RBM consisting of N visible neurons, hidden density neurons alpha=M/N=2 and 1-step contrastive divergence (CD_1), by minimizing the Kullbach-Liebler divergence of the RBM and the training data set coming from the algorithmic variant of quantum Monte Carlo, known as discrete Path-Integral Monte Carlo. For this last step, we use Trotter-Suzuki decomposition with m Trotter slices and the Wolff-s cluster algorithm. After training the RBM, we calculate magnetic observables based on the RBM-s wave-function such as longitudinal and transverse magnetization, for different values of transverse field and we do an estimation of the critical field at which the transverse Ising model system suffers a quantum phase transition from ferromagnet to paramagnet
Abstract The development of generative models for quantum machine learning has faced challenges such as trainability and scalability. A notable example is the quantum restricted Boltzmann machine (QRBM), where non-commuting Hamiltonians make gradient evaluation computationally demanding, even on fault-tolerant devices. In this work, we propose a semi-quantum restricted Boltzmann machine (sqRBM), a model designed to overcome difficulties associated with QRBMs. The sqRBM Hamiltonian commutes in the visible subspace while remaining non-commuting in the hidden subspace, enabling us to derive closed-form expressions for output probabilities and gradients. Our analysis shows that, for learning a given distribution, a classical model requires three times more hidden units than an sqRBM. Numerical simulations with up to 100 units validate this prediction. With reduced resource demands, sqRBMs provide a feasible framework for early quantum generative models.
The restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) is a two-layer energy-based model that uses its hidden-visible connections to learn the underlying distribution of visible units, whose interactions are often complicated by high-order correlations. Previous studies on the Ising model of small system sizes have shown that RBMs are able to accurately learn the Boltzmann distribution and reconstruct thermal quantities at temperatures away from the critical point Tc. How the RBM encodes the Boltzmann distribution and captures the phase transition are, however, not well explained. In this work, we perform RBM learning of the 2d and 3d Ising model and carefully examine how the RBM extracts useful probabilistic and physical information from Ising configurations. We find several indicators derived from the weight matrix that could characterize the Ising phase transition. We verify that the hidden encoding of a visible state tends to have an equal number of positive and negative units, whose sequence is randomly assigned during training and can be inferred by analyzing the weight matrix. We also explore the physical meaning of the visible energy and loss function (pseudo-likelihood) of the RBM and show that they could be harnessed to predict the critical point or estimate physical quantities such as entropy.
Abstract A restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) is a two-layer neural-network machine-learning model comprising a visible layer that represents observed data and a hidden layer that captures correlations among the visible units. Rooted in ideas from statistical mechanics, RBMs provide a probabilistic framework for modeling complex, high-dimensional distributions through an energy function and a corresponding Boltzmann distribution. This review offers an accessible introduction to RBMs from a physics-oriented perspective, focusing on their core concepts and training principles. We survey key theoretical developments that interpret RBMs as many-body systems, highlighting their equilibrium/non-equilibrium thermodynamics, learning dynamics, mean-field properties, phase diagrams, and free energy calculation. We further discuss recent applications of RBMs to a range of physics problems, including quantum-mechanical wavefunction representation, statistical-mechanical Boltzmann distribution modeling, and biological protein sequence analysis.