A central problem in quantum mechanics involves solving the Electronic Schrödinger Equation for a molecule or material. The Variational Monte Carlo approach to this problem approximates a particular variational objective via sampling, and then optimizes this approximated objective over a chosen parameterized family of wavefunctions, known as the ansatz. Recently neural networks have been used as the ansatz, with accompanying success. However, sampling from such wavefunctions has required the use of a Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach, which is inherently inefficient. In this work, we propose a solution to this problem via an ansatz which is cheap to sample from, yet satisfies the requisite quantum mechanical properties. We prove that a normalizing flow using the following two essential ingredients satisfies our requirements: (a) a base distribution which is constructed from Determinantal Point Processes; (b) flow layers which are equivariant to a particular subgroup of the permutation group. We then show how to construct both continuous and discrete normalizing flows which satisfy the requisite equivariance. We further demonstrate the manner in which the non-smooth nature (``cusps'') of the wavefunction may be captured, and how the framework may be generalized to provide induction across multiple molecules. The resulting theoretical framework entails an efficient approach to solving the Electronic Schrödinger Equation.
A central problem in quantum mechanics involves solving the Electronic Schrödinger Equation for a molecule or material. The Variational Monte Carlo approach to this problem approximates a particular variational objective via sampling, and then optimizes this approximated objective over a chosen parameterized family of wavefunctions, known as the ansatz. Recently neural networks have been used as the ansatz, with accompanying success. However, sampling from such wavefunctions has required the use of a Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach, which is inherently inefficient. In this work, we propose a solution to this problem via an ansatz which is cheap to sample from, yet satisfies the requisite quantum mechanical properties. We prove that a normalizing flow using the following two essential ingredients satisfies our requirements: (a) a base distribution which is constructed from Determinantal Point Processes; (b) flow layers which are equivariant to a particular subgroup of the permutation group. We then show how to construct both continuous and discrete normalizing flows which satisfy the requisite equivariance. We further demonstrate the manner in which the non-smooth nature (``cusps'') of the wavefunction may be captured, and how the framework may be generalized to provide induction across multiple molecules. The resulting theoretical framework entails an efficient approach to solving the Electronic Schrödinger Equation.
A central problem in quantum mechanics involves solving the Electronic Schrodinger Equation for a molecule or material. The Variational Monte Carlo approach to this problem approximates a particular variational objective via sampling, and then optimizes this approximated objective over a chosen parameterized family of wavefunctions, known as the ansatz. Recently neural networks have been used as the ansatz, with accompanying success. However, sampling from such wavefunctions has required the use of a Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach, which is inherently inefficient. In this work, we propose a solution to this problem via an ansatz which is cheap to sample from, yet satisfies the requisite quantum mechanical properties. We prove that a normalizing flow using the following two essential ingredients satisfies our requirements: (a) a base distribution which is constructed from Determinantal Point Processes; (b) flow layers which are equivariant to a particular subgroup of the permutation group. We then show how to construct both continuous and discrete normalizing flows which satisfy the requisite equivariance. We further demonstrate the manner in which the non-smooth nature ("cusps") of the wavefunction may be captured, and how the framework may be generalized to provide induction across multiple molecules. The resulting theoretical framework entails an efficient approach to solving the Electronic Schrodinger Equation.
Solving the quantum many-body Schrödinger equation is a fundamental and challenging problem in the fields of quantum physics, quantum chemistry, and material sciences. One of the common computational approaches to this problem is Quantum Variational Monte Carlo (QVMC), in which ground-state solutions are obtained by minimizing the energy of the system within a restricted family of parameterized wave functions. Deep learning methods partially address the limitations of traditional QVMC by representing a rich family of wave functions in terms of neural networks. However, the optimization objective in QVMC remains notoriously hard to minimize and requires second-order optimization methods such as natural gradient. In this paper, we first reformulate energy functional minimization in the space of Born distributions corresponding to particle-permutation (anti-)symmetric wave functions, rather than the space of wave functions. We then interpret QVMC as the Fisher-Rao gradient flow in this distributional space, followed by a projection step onto the variational manifold. This perspective provides us with a principled framework to derive new QMC algorithms, by endowing the distributional space with better metrics, and following the projected gradient flow induced by those metrics. More specifically, we propose "Wasserstein Quantum Monte Carlo" (WQMC), which uses the gradient flow induced by the Wasserstein metric, rather than Fisher-Rao metric, and corresponds to transporting the probability mass, rather than teleporting it. We demonstrate empirically that the dynamics of WQMC results in faster convergence to the ground state of molecular systems.
Recent advances in machine learning have facilitated numerically accurate solution of the electronic Schrödinger equation (SE) by integrating various neural network (NN)-based wave function ansatzes with variational Monte Carlo methods. Nevertheless, such NN-based methods are all based on the Born-Oppenheimer approximation (BOA) and require computationally expensive training for each nuclear configuration. In this work, we propose a novel NN architecture, SchrödingerNet, to solve the full electronic-nuclear SE by defining a loss function designed to equalize local energies across the system. This approach is based on a translationally, rotationally and permutationally symmetry-adapted total wave function ansatz that includes both nuclear and electronic coordinates. This strategy not only allows for an efficient and accurate generation of a continuous potential energy surface at any geometry within the well-sampled nuclear configuration space, but also incorporates non-BOA corrections, through a single training process. Comparison with benchmarks of atomic and small molecular systems demonstrates its accuracy and efficiency.
Directly solving the full electron-nuclear Schrödinger equation remains one of the grand challenges in quantum mechanics. Here, we propose a quantum-chemically motivated orbital-based neural network wavefunction ansatz with explicit many-body electron-electron correlation terms, with parameters depending on the entire electron-nuclear configuration, enabling an accurate description of strongly correlated and/or multi-reference electronic structures by a single Slater-determinant across a broad nuclear configuration space. To train this wavefunction, we further develop an efficient hybrid optimization strategy that combines the variational Monte Carlo technique with local-energy constraints, mitigating the intrinsic sampling bias of the former and considerably reducing the statistical error. These advances are embedded in a unified neural network framework, Schrödinger, enabling the determination of globally accurate potential energy surfaces with a single training for systems ranging from strongly correlated diatomic molecules, triatomic reactions containing conical intersections, to polyatomic multi-reference molecules. This work offers a practical machine-learning tool for solving the electron-nuclear Schrödinger equation and capturing full quantum effects beyond the Born-Oppenheimer approximation.
We introduce a framework for fermionic variational Monte Carlo in which a continuous normalizing flow refines a fixed antisymmetric base wavefunction. The flow is a permutation-equivariant neural ordinary differential equation (ODE), a smooth, topology-preserving map; equivariance preserves the antisymmetry of the base, so the flow can in principle improve any antisymmetric ansatz that can be sampled efficiently. The flow deforms the nodal surface of the base but cannot change its topology, so the base must supply the correct nodal topology. We use Slater and Jastrow-Slater bases in this work. Exact samples from the flow's Born distribution are obtained by pushing pre-cached base samples through the forward ODE, requiring no Markov chain Monte Carlo at training time. Base samples are generated offline and reused across batches and runs, enabling embarrassingly parallel training across multiple GPUs. We introduce three permutation-equivariant vector field architectures, Pairwise Deep Sets, FermiNet Vector Fields, and Pairwise Deep Sets Gradient, each balancing expressivity and computational cost differently. We further introduce an augmented dynamics formulation that co-evolves the derivatives required for the kinetic energy as ODE state variables, eliminating differentiation through the ODE trajectory and significantly reducing wall-clock time and memory. On harmonically trapped spinless electrons, the flow reaches ground-state energies below configuration interaction with single and double excitations, on par with a FermiNet baseline trained with the same optimizer. Training shows near-ideal strong scaling to 128 NVIDIA A100 GPUs on NERSC's Perlmutter for the largest systems tested, up to N=48 particles in three dimensions.
The solution of Schrödinger equation generates the quantisation properties of the system, which can completely describe the quantum behaviour of microscopic particles in a physical system. However, solving the Schrödinger equation is a non-deterministic polynomial time (NP)-hard problem. Numerical methods for solving the Schrödinger equation require careful selection of basis configurations, and the complete basis set has high accuracy but its complexity increases exponentially in the number of particles. Therefore, it is crucial to find an effective numerical method. To solve this problem, this paper present a deep learning architecture, VMCNet, using the powerful computational efficiency of neural networks to improve the speed of numerical computation. Moreover, this paper proposes a suitable wavefunction ansatz, witch determines the accuracy of neural networks, that achieves more accurate energy solutions of the many-electron Schrödinger equation compared to the conventional single-determinant variational molecular Monte Carlo. We introduce non-local and local blocks to represent quantum mechanical interactions, which contain more physical information about the particle system. The experimental results show that VMCNet can cover more than 93% of the correlation energy of the main group elements (Be–Ne) for the monoatomic system and more than 90% of the correlation energy for the diatomic system.