Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

Recognizing the topological phase transition by Variational Autoregressive Networks

Lingxiao Wang, Yin Jiang, Lianyi He, Kai Zhou

Published May 11, 2020• 3 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

A generative model, the Variational Autoregressive Networks(VANs) is introduced to recognize the Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition on a periodic square lattice. Vortices as the quasi-Long Range Order(LRO) are accurately detected by the ordering neural networks. By learning the microscopic possibility distributions from macroscopic thermal distribution, the free energy is directly calculated and vortices(anti-vortices) pair emerge with temperature rising. As a more precise estimation, the helicity modulus is evaluated to anchor the transition temperature to be at $\beta_\text{c}=1.101$. Although time-consuming of the training process is inevitably increasing with the lattice size, the training time remains unchanged around the transition temperature.

Related papers

Continuous-mixture Autoregressive Networks for the Efficient Variational Calculation of Spin System

Lingxiao Wang, Yin Jiang, Lianyi He +1 more

We develop the deep autoregressive networks with multi-channel to compute continuous spin system directly. As a concrete example, the 2-D XY model is embedded into the continuous-mixture networks, in which the Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition emerges on a periodic square lattice. Vortices as the quasi-Long Range Order(LRO) are accurately detected by the autoregressive neural networks. By learning the microscopic possibility distributions from macroscopic thermal distribution, the free energy is directly calculated and vortices (anti-vortices) pair emerge with temperature rise. As a more precise estimation, the helicity modulus is evaluated to anchor the transition temperature to be at $\beta_\text{c}=1.101$. Although the time-consuming of the training process inevitably increases with the lattice size, the training time remains unchanged around the transition temperature.

•May 11, 2020•0 citations

Continuous-Mixture Autoregressive Networks Learning the Kosterlitz-Thouless Transition

Lingxiao Wang, Yin Jiang, Lianyi He +1 more

We develop deep autoregressive networks with multi channels to compute many-body systems with continuous spin degrees of freedom directly. As a concrete example, we demonstrate the two-dimensional XY model with the continuous-mixture networks and rediscover the Kosterlitz–Thouless (KT) phase transition on a periodic square lattice. Vortices characterizing the quasi-long range order are accurately detected by the generative model. By learning the microscopic probability distributions from the macroscopic thermal distribution, the networks are trained as an efficient physical sampler which can approximate the free energy and estimate thermodynamic observables unbiasedly with importance sampling. As a more precise evaluation, we compute the helicity modulus to determine the KT transition temperature. Although the training process becomes more time-consuming with larger lattice sizes, the training time remains unchanged around the KT transition temperature. The continuous-mixture autoregressive networks we developed thus can be potentially used to study other many-body systems with continuous degrees of freedom.

arXiv:2005.04857•Chinese Physics Letters•Nov 21, 2022•19 citations

Machine learning vortices at the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition

Matthew J. S. Beach, Anna Golubeva, Roger G. Melko

The authors extend the recent successful application of neural networks fordistinguishing phases of matter to the case of topologically driven phase transitions. They demonstrate that supervised networks correctly identify the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition in the two-dimensional classical XY model. However, their analysis suggests that a naive classification of phases is based on bulk features, rather than on detecting local topological defects. While they show that it is possible to fine-tune a network to recognize vortices, it generally remains a difficult task to detect topological defects without $a\phantom{\rule{0.333em}{0ex}}p\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}r\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}i\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}o\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}r\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}i$ knowledge.

arXiv:1710.09842•Physical review. B./Physical review. B•Jan 25, 2018•167 citations

Machine learning of phase transitions in the percolation and XY models

Wanzhou Zhang, Jiayu Liu, Tzu-Chieh Wei

In this paper, we apply machine learning methods to study phase transitions in certain statistical mechanical models on the two-dimensional lattices, whose transitions involve nonlocal or topological properties, including site and bond percolations, the XY model, and the generalized XY model. We find that using just one hidden layer in a fully connected neural network, the percolation transition can be learned and the data collapse by using the average output layer gives correct estimate of the critical exponent ν. We also study the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition, which involves binding and unbinding of topological defects, vortices and antivortices, in the classical XY model. The generalized XY model contains richer phases, such as the nematic phase, the paramagnetic and the quasi-long-range ferromagnetic phases, and we also apply machine learning method to it. We obtain a consistent phase diagram from the network trained with only data along the temperature axis at two particular parameter Δ values, where Δ is the relative weight of pure XY coupling. Aside from using the spin configurations (either angles or spin components) as the input information in a convolutional neural network, we devise a feature engineering approach using the histograms of the spin orientations in order to train the network to learn the three phases in the generalized XY model and demonstrate that it indeed works. The trained network by using system size L×L can be used to the phase diagram for other sizes (L^{'}×L^{'}, where L^{'}≠L) without any further training.

arXiv:1804.02709•Physical review. E•Mar 29, 2019•114 citations

Machine-learning detection of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition and the second-order phase transition in XXZ models

Yusuke Miyajima, Masahito Mochizuki

We propose two machine-learning methods based on neural networks, which we respectively call the phase-classification method and the temperature-identification method, for detecting different types of phase transitions in the XXZ models without prior knowledge of their critical temperatures. The XXZ models have exchange couplings which are anisotropic in the spin space where the strength is represented by a parameter $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}(>0)$. The models exhibit second-order phase transition when $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}>1$, but the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) phase transition when $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}<1$. In the phase-classification method, the neural network is trained using spin or vortex configurations of well-known classical spin models other than the XXZ models, e.g., the Ising models and the XY models, to classify those of the XXZ models to corresponding phases. We demonstrate that the trained neural network successfully detects the phase transitions for both $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}>1$ and $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}<1$, and the evaluated critical temperatures coincide well with those evaluated by conventional numerical calculations. In the temperature-identification method, on the other hand, the neural network is trained so as to identify temperatures at which the input spin or vortex configurations are generated by the Monte Carlo thermalization. The critical temperatures are evaluated by analyzing the optimized weight matrix, which coincides with the result of numerical calculation for the second-order phase transition in the Ising-like XXZ model with $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}=1.05$ but cannot be determined uniquely for the BKT transition in the XY-like XXZ model with $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}=0.95$.

arXiv:2304.08871•Physical review. B./Physical review. B•Apr 17, 2023•14 citations

Machine learning detection of Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transitions in q -state clock models

Yusuke Miyajima, Yusuke Murata, Yasuhiro Tanaka +1 more

We demonstrate that a machine learning technique with a simple feedforward neural network can sensitively detect two successive phase transitions associated with the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) phase in $q$-state clock models simultaneously by analyzing the weight matrix components connecting the hidden and output layers. We find that the method requires only a data set of the raw spatial spin configurations for the learning procedure. This data set is generated by Monte Carlo thermalizations at selected temperatures. Neither prior knowledge of, for example, the transition temperatures, number of phases, and order parameters nor processed data sets of, for example, the vortex configurations, histograms of spin orientations, and correlation functions produced from the original spin-configuration data are needed, in contrast with most of previously proposed machine learning methods based on supervised learning. Our neural network evaluates the transition temperatures as ${T}_{2}/J=0.921$ and ${T}_{1}/J=0.410$ for the paramagnetic-to-BKT transition and BKT-to-ferromagnetic transition in the eight-state clock model on a square lattice. Both critical temperatures agree well with those evaluated in the previous numerical studies.

arXiv:2108.05823•Physical review. B./Physical review. B•Aug 11, 2021•32 citations
A generative model, the Variational Autoregressive Networks(VANs) is introduced to recognize the Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition on a periodic square lattice. Vortices as the quasi-Long Range Order(LRO) are accurately detected by the ordering neural networks. By learning the microscopic possibility distributions from macroscopic thermal distribution, the free energy is directly calculated and vortices(anti-vortices) pair emerge with temperature rising. As a more precise estimation, the helicity modulus is evaluated to anchor the transition temperature to be at βc=1.101\beta_\text{c}=1.101βc​=1.101. Although time-consuming of the training process is inevitably increasing with the lattice size, the training time remains unchanged around the transition temperature.
We develop the deep autoregressive networks with multi-channel to compute continuous spin system directly. As a concrete example, the 2-D XY model is embedded into the continuous-mixture networks, in which the Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition emerges on a periodic square lattice. Vortices as the quasi-Long Range Order(LRO) are accurately detected by the autoregressive neural networks. By learning the microscopic possibility distributions from macroscopic thermal distribution, the free energy is directly calculated and vortices (anti-vortices) pair emerge with temperature rise. As a more precise estimation, the helicity modulus is evaluated to anchor the transition temperature to be at βc=1.101\beta_\text{c}=1.101βc​=1.101. Although the time-consuming of the training process inevitably increases with the lattice size, the training time remains unchanged around the transition temperature.
We develop deep autoregressive networks with multi channels to compute many-body systems with continuous spin degrees of freedom directly. As a concrete example, we demonstrate the two-dimensional XY model with the continuous-mixture networks and rediscover the Kosterlitz–Thouless (KT) phase transition on a periodic square lattice. Vortices characterizing the quasi-long range order are accurately detected by the generative model. By learning the microscopic probability distributions from the macroscopic thermal distribution, the networks are trained as an efficient physical sampler which can approximate the free energy and estimate thermodynamic observables unbiasedly with importance sampling. As a more precise evaluation, we compute the helicity modulus to determine the KT transition temperature. Although the training process becomes more time-consuming with larger lattice sizes, the training time remains unchanged around the KT transition temperature. The continuous-mixture autoregressive networks we developed thus can be potentially used to study other many-body systems with continuous degrees of freedom.
The authors extend the recent successful application of neural networks fordistinguishing phases of matter to the case of topologically driven phase transitions. They demonstrate that supervised networks correctly identify the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition in the two-dimensional classical XY model. However, their analysis suggests that a naive classification of phases is based on bulk features, rather than on detecting local topological defects. While they show that it is possible to fine-tune a network to recognize vortices, it generally remains a difficult task to detect topological defects without $a\phantom{\rule{0.333em}{0ex}}p\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}r\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}i\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}o\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}r\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}i$ knowledge.
In this paper, we apply machine learning methods to study phase transitions in certain statistical mechanical models on the two-dimensional lattices, whose transitions involve nonlocal or topological properties, including site and bond percolations, the XY model, and the generalized XY model. We find that using just one hidden layer in a fully connected neural network, the percolation transition can be learned and the data collapse by using the average output layer gives correct estimate of the critical exponent ν. We also study the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition, which involves binding and unbinding of topological defects, vortices and antivortices, in the classical XY model. The generalized XY model contains richer phases, such as the nematic phase, the paramagnetic and the quasi-long-range ferromagnetic phases, and we also apply machine learning method to it. We obtain a consistent phase diagram from the network trained with only data along the temperature axis at two particular parameter Δ values, where Δ is the relative weight of pure XY coupling. Aside from using the spin configurations (either angles or spin components) as the input information in a convolutional neural network, we devise a feature engineering approach using the histograms of the spin orientations in order to train the network to learn the three phases in the generalized XY model and demonstrate that it indeed works. The trained network by using system size L×L can be used to the phase diagram for other sizes (L^{'}×L^{'}, where L^{'}≠L) without any further training.
We propose two machine-learning methods based on neural networks, which we respectively call the phase-classification method and the temperature-identification method, for detecting different types of phase transitions in the XXZ models without prior knowledge of their critical temperatures. The XXZ models have exchange couplings which are anisotropic in the spin space where the strength is represented by a parameter $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}(>0)$. The models exhibit second-order phase transition when $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}>1$, but the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) phase transition when $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}<1$. In the phase-classification method, the neural network is trained using spin or vortex configurations of well-known classical spin models other than the XXZ models, e.g., the Ising models and the XY models, to classify those of the XXZ models to corresponding phases. We demonstrate that the trained neural network successfully detects the phase transitions for both $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}>1$ and $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}<1$, and the evaluated critical temperatures coincide well with those evaluated by conventional numerical calculations. In the temperature-identification method, on the other hand, the neural network is trained so as to identify temperatures at which the input spin or vortex configurations are generated by the Monte Carlo thermalization. The critical temperatures are evaluated by analyzing the optimized weight matrix, which coincides with the result of numerical calculation for the second-order phase transition in the Ising-like XXZ model with $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}=1.05$ but cannot be determined uniquely for the BKT transition in the XY-like XXZ model with $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}=0.95$.
We demonstrate that a machine learning technique with a simple feedforward neural network can sensitively detect two successive phase transitions associated with the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) phase in qqq-state clock models simultaneously by analyzing the weight matrix components connecting the hidden and output layers. We find that the method requires only a data set of the raw spatial spin configurations for the learning procedure. This data set is generated by Monte Carlo thermalizations at selected temperatures. Neither prior knowledge of, for example, the transition temperatures, number of phases, and order parameters nor processed data sets of, for example, the vortex configurations, histograms of spin orientations, and correlation functions produced from the original spin-configuration data are needed, in contrast with most of previously proposed machine learning methods based on supervised learning. Our neural network evaluates the transition temperatures as T2/J=0.921{T}_{2}/J=0.921T2​/J=0.921 and T1/J=0.410{T}_{1}/J=0.410T1​/J=0.410 for the paramagnetic-to-BKT transition and BKT-to-ferromagnetic transition in the eight-state clock model on a square lattice. Both critical temperatures agree well with those evaluated in the previous numerical studies.