Neural-Network Quantum States have been recently introduced as an Ansatz for describing the wave function of quantum many-body systems. We show that there are strong connections between Neural-Network Quantum States in the form of Restricted Boltzmann Machines and some classes of Tensor-Network states in arbitrary dimensions. In particular we demonstrate that short-range Restricted Boltzmann Machines are Entangled Plaquette States, while fully connected Restricted Boltzmann Machines are String-Bond States with a nonlocal geometry and low bond dimension. These results shed light on the underlying architecture of Restricted Boltzmann Machines and their efficiency at representing many-body quantum states. String-Bond States also provide a generic way of enhancing the power of Neural-Network Quantum States and a natural generalization to systems with larger local Hilbert space. We compare the advantages and drawbacks of these different classes of states and present a method to combine them together. This allows us to benefit from both the entanglement structure of Tensor Networks and the efficiency of Neural-Network Quantum States into a single Ansatz capable of targeting the wave function of strongly correlated systems. While it remains a challenge to describe states with chiral topological order using traditional Tensor Networks, we show that Neural-Network Quantum States and their String-Bond States extension can describe a lattice Fractional Quantum Hall state exactly. In addition, we provide numerical evidence that Neural-Network Quantum States can approximate a chiral spin liquid with better accuracy than Entangled Plaquette States and local String-Bond States. Our results demonstrate the efficiency of neural networks to describe complex quantum wave functions and pave the way towards the use of String-Bond States as a tool in more traditional machine-learning applications.
Neural-Network Quantum States have been recently introduced as an Ansatz for describing the wave function of quantum many-body systems. We show that there are strong connections between Neural-Network Quantum States in the form of Restricted Boltzmann Machines and some classes of Tensor-Network states in arbitrary dimensions. In particular we demonstrate that short-range Restricted Boltzmann Machines are Entangled Plaquette States, while fully connected Restricted Boltzmann Machines are String-Bond States with a nonlocal geometry and low bond dimension. These results shed light on the underlying architecture of Restricted Boltzmann Machines and their efficiency at representing many-body quantum states. String-Bond States also provide a generic way of enhancing the power of Neural-Network Quantum States and a natural generalization to systems with larger local Hilbert space. We compare the advantages and drawbacks of these different classes of states and present a method to combine them together. This allows us to benefit from both the entanglement structure of Tensor Networks and the efficiency of Neural-Network Quantum States into a single Ansatz capable of targeting the wave function of strongly correlated systems. While it remains a challenge to describe states with chiral topological order using traditional Tensor Networks, we show that Neural-Network Quantum States and their String-Bond States extension can describe a lattice Fractional Quantum Hall state exactly. In addition, we provide numerical evidence that Neural-Network Quantum States can approximate a chiral spin liquid with better accuracy than Entangled Plaquette States and local String-Bond States. Our results demonstrate the efficiency of neural networks to describe complex quantum wave functions and pave the way towards the use of String-Bond States as a tool in more traditional machine-learning applications.
Neural network quantum states emerge as a promising tool for solving quantum many-body problems. However, its successes and limitations are still not well-understood in particular for Fermions with complex sign structures. Based on our recent work [J. Chem. Theory Comput. 21, 10252-10262 (2025)], we generalizes the restricted Boltzmann machine to a more general class of states for Fermions, formed by product of `neurons' and hence will be referred to as neuron product states (NPS). NPS builds correlation in a very different way, compared with the closely related correlator product states (CPS) [H. J. Changlani, et al. Phys. Rev. B, 80, 245116 (2009)], which use full-rank local correlators. In constrast, each correlator in NPS contains long-range correlations across all the sites, with its representational power constrained by the simple function form. We prove that products of such simple nonlocal correlators can approximate any wavefunction arbitrarily well under certain mild conditions on the form of activation functions. In addition, we also provide elementary proofs for the universal approximation capabilities of feedforward neural network (FNN) and neural network backflow (NNBF) in second quantization. Together, these results provide a deeper insight into the neural network representation of many-body wavefunctions in second quantization.
We introduce Neural Tensor Network States (νTNS), a variational many-body wave-function ansatz that integrates deep neural networks with tensor-network architectures. In the νTNS framework, a neural network serves as a disentangler of the wave-function, transforming the physical degrees of freedom into renormalized variables with much less entanglement. The renormalized state is then efficiently encoded by a back-flow tensor network. This construction yields a compact yet highly expressive representation of strongly correlated quantum states. Using convolutional neural networks combined with matrix product states as a concrete implementation, we obtain state-of-the-art variational energies for the spin-1/2J1-J2 Heisenberg model on the square lattice at the highly frustrated point J2/J1=0.5, for systems up to 20×20 with periodic boundary conditions. Finite-size scaling of spin, dimer, and plaquette correlations exhibits power-law decay without magnetic or valence-bond long-range order, consistent with a gapless quantum spin-liquid ground state at that point.This νTNS framework is flexible and naturally extensible to other neural and tensor-network structures, offering a general platform for investigating strongly correlated quantum many-body systems.
Neural network quantum states (NQS) have emerged as a powerful and flexible framework for addressing quantum many-body problems. While successful for model Hamiltonians, their application to molecular systems remains challenging for several reasons. In this work, we introduce three innovations to overcome some of the key limitations. (1) We develop a bounded-degree graph recurrent neural network (BDG–RNN) ansatz, which hybridizes the tensor network and neural network states and is more suitable to molecular electronic structure problems. As matrix product states (MPS) can be embedded into this ansatz, good initialization is possible for complex systems. (2) We introduce neural network correlators (NNCs) to further enhance expressivity and improve accuracy, without dramatically modifying the underlying variational Monte Carlo (VMC) optimization framework. Specifically, we introduce two types of restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM)-inspired correlators, namely, cos-RBM and Ising-RBM, which unlike previous correlators, such as Jastrow and real RBM, can adjust the sign structure of the wave function. (3) We introduce a semistochastic algorithm for local energy evaluation, which significantly reduces computational cost while maintaining high accuracy. Combining these advances, we demonstrate that our approaches can achieve chemical accuracy in challenging systems, including the one-dimensional hydrogen chain H 50, the iron–sulfur cluster [Fe 2 S 2 (SCH 3 ) 4 ] 2–, and a three-dimensional 3 × 3 × 2 hydrogen cluster H 18 . These methods are implemented in an open-source package, P y NQS ( https://github.com/Quantum-Chemistry-Group-BNU/PyNQS ), to advance NQS methodologies for quantum chemistry.
We study the representational power of Boltzmann machines (a type of neural network) in quantum many-body systems. We prove that any (local) tensor network state has a (local) neural network representation. The construction is almost optimal in the sense that the number of parameters in the neural network representation is almost linear in the number of nonzero parameters in the tensor network representation. Despite the difficulty of representing (gapped) chiral topological states with local tensor networks, we construct a quasilocal neural network representation for a chiral p-wave superconductor. These results demonstrate the power of Boltzmann machines.
We develop a machine learning method to construct accurate ground-state wave functions of strongly interacting and entangled quantum spin as well as fermionic models on lattices. A restricted Boltzmann machine algorithm in the form of an artificial neural network is combined with a conventional variational Monte Carlo method with pair product (geminal) wave functions and quantum number projections. The combination allows an application of the machine learning scheme to interacting fermionic systems. The combined method substantially improves the accuracy beyond that ever achieved by each method separately, in the Heisenberg as well as Hubbard models on square lattices, thus proving its power as a highly accurate quantum many-body solver.
An artificial neural network (ANN) with the restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) architecture was recently proposed as a versatile variational quantum many-body wave function. In this work we provide physical insights into the performance of this ansatz. We uncover the connection between the structure of the RBM and perturbation series, which explains the excellent precision achieved by the RBM ansatz in certain simple models, demonstrated in G. Carleo and M. Troyer [Science 355, 602 (2017)]. Based on this relation, we improve the numerical algorithm to achieve a better performance of the RBM in cases where local minima complicate the convergence to the global one. Furthermore, we study the performance of a sparse RBM for approximating ground states of random, translationally invariant models in one dimension, as well as random matrix-product states. We find that the error in approximating such states exhibits a broad distribution and shows a positive correlation with the entanglement properties of the targeted state.