It is challenging to identify the state of many-body quantum systems, as recovering density matrices underlying the quantum state typically requires computational resources scale exponentially to the system size. In this work, we introduce the variational diffusion model (VDM) to efficiently learn high-dimensional quantum distributions with high fidelity, which is essential to realize the fast reconstruction of quantum states. We build up the VDM suitable for dealing with the high-dimensional quantum samples, and then perform numerical experiments to test our model and other autoregressive models, including recurrent neural network and transformer. It is found that the VDM can achieve a modest better performance with fewest parameters than other two to learn the distribution as desired. Our results pave the way to applying diffusion models to solve hard problems in the quantum domain.
It is challenging to identify the state of many-body quantum systems, as recovering density matrices underlying the quantum state typically requires computational resources scale exponentially to the system size. In this work, we introduce the variational diffusion model (VDM) to efficiently learn high-dimensional quantum distributions with high fidelity, which is essential to realize the fast reconstruction of quantum states. We build up the VDM suitable for dealing with the high-dimensional quantum samples, and then perform numerical experiments to test our model and other autoregressive models, including recurrent neural network and transformer. It is found that the VDM can achieve a modest better performance with fewest parameters than other two to learn the distribution as desired. Our results pave the way to applying diffusion models to solve hard problems in the quantum domain.
The exact description of many-body quantum systems represents one of the major challenges in modern physics, because it requires an amount of computational resources that scales exponentially with the size of the system. Simulating the evolution of a state, or even storing its description, rapidly becomes intractable for exact classical algorithms. Recently, machine learning techniques, in the form of restricted Boltzmann machines, have been proposed as a way to efficiently represent certain quantum states with applications in state tomography and ground state estimation. Here, we introduce a practically usable deep architecture for representing and sampling from probability distributions of quantum states. Our representation is based on variational auto-encoders, a type of generative model in the form of a neural network. We show that this model is able to learn efficient representations of states that are easy to simulate classically and can compress states that are not classically tractable. Specifically, we consider the learnability of a class of quantum states introduced by Fefferman and Umans. Such states are provably hard to sample for classical computers, but not for quantum ones, under plausible computational complexity assumptions. The good level of compression achieved for hard states suggests these methods can be suitable for characterizing states of the size expected in first generation quantum hardware.
Learning many-body quantum systems is of fundamental importance in quantum information processing, however, it is a challenging task which typically requires estimating quantum distributions of dimensionality exponentially scaling to the system size. As generative models have shown a great scalability to learn high-dimensional distributions and found wide applications in the domain of image and text, they can be a powerful tool to facilitate us to accomplish the challenging quantum tasks. In this work, we propose using normalizing flow (NF) models with fast sampling to learn discrete quantum distributions for quantum state tomography. Particularly, three NF models, including denoising flow, argmax flow, and tree flow, are first adapted to the task of explicit quantum probability density estimation. We then perform extensive experiments on a large scale of quantum systems, and our numerical results demonstrate that these discrete NFs admit an excellent sampling efficiency in the sense that they are insensitive to the system size to learn the high-dimensional quantum distributions, without compromising the learning performance. Finally, in comparison to the other generative models, such as autoregressive, the NFs avoid the problem of slow sequential sampling.
Abstract The exact description of many-body quantum systems represents one of the major challenges in modern physics, because it requires an amount of computational resources that scales exponentially with the size of the system. Simulating the evolution of a state, or even storing its description, rapidly becomes intractable for exact classical algorithms. Recently, machine learning techniques, in the form of restricted Boltzmann machines, have been proposed as a way to efficiently represent certain quantum states with applications in state tomography and ground state estimation. Here, we introduce a practically usable deep architecture for representing and sampling from probability distributions of quantum states. Our representation is based on variational auto-encoders, a type of generative model in the form of a neural network. We show that this model is able to learn efficient representations of states that are easy to simulate classically and can compress states that are not classically tractable. Specifically, we consider the learnability of a class of quantum states introduced by Fefferman and Umans. Such states are provably hard to sample for classical computers, but not for quantum ones, under plausible computational complexity assumptions. The good level of compression achieved for hard states suggests these methods can be suitable for characterizing states of the size expected in first generation quantum hardware.
Quantum computing has the potential to revolutionize numerous aspects of science and engineering, and extensive research in the past decades has been undertaken to exhibit quantum advantage over classical computers. Nevertheless, building robust quantum computers involves enormous technological challenges, and therefore many attempts are devoted to closing the gaps by developing classical simulation algorithms for problems in many body physics. Among these, the most notable are machine learning algorithms. This paper contributes to the development of these toolkits by studying the power of deep generative neural networks, including variational autoencoders and normalizing flows, to represent the distributions generated by quantum computing. The results show that these modern generative networks are only capable of partially capturing features of the quantum system including the overall distribution shapes, but missing the granularities such as local spikes and annihilations in the distributions This incomplete information reconstruction might be due to the inherent limitation of the classical algorithms when encountering the complex quantum states with the exponential growing Hilbert space. The results also show that variational autoencoders perform slightly better than normalizing flows for many cases, and the complimentary strength between the expressibility of variational autoencoders and normalizing flows is observed and worth further exploration.
An important task in quantum generative machine learning is to model the probability distribution of measurements of many-body quantum systems. Classical generative models, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs), can model the distributions of product states with high fidelity, but fail or require an exponential number of parameters to model entangled states. In this paper, we introduce a quantum-enhanced VAE (QeVAE), a generative quantum-classical hybrid model that uses quantum correlations to improve the fidelity over classical VAEs, while requiring only a linear number of parameters. We provide a closed-form expression for the output distributions of the QeVAE. We also empirically show that the QeVAE outperforms classical models on several classes of quantum states, such as 4-qubit and 8-qubit quantum circuit states, haar random states, and quantum kicked rotor states, with a more than 2x increase in fidelity for some states. Finally, we find that the trained model outperforms the classical model when executed on the IBMq Manila quantum computer. Our work paves the way for new applications of quantum generative learning algorithms and characterizing measurement distributions of high-dimensional quantum states.
Learning probability distribution is an essential framework in classical learning theory. As a counterpart, quantum state learning has spurred the exploration of quantum machine learning theory. However, as dimensionality increases, learning a high-dimensional unknown quantum state via conventional quantum neural network approaches remains challenging due to trainability issues. In this work we devise the quantum sequential scattering model, inspired by the classical diffusion model, to overcome this scalability issue. Training of our model could effectively circumvent the vanishing gradient problem for a large class of high-dimensional target states possessing polynomial-scaled Schmidt ranks. Theoretical analysis and numerical experiments provide evidence for our model's effectiveness in learning both physically and algorithmically meaningful quantum states and outperform the conventional approaches in training speed and learning accuracy. Our work indicates that an increasing entanglement (a property of quantum states) in the target states necessitates a larger-scaled model, which could reduce our model's learning performance and efficiency.