Accurate solutions for ab initio quantum chemistry are critical for understanding chemistry on the atomic scale. Recently, optimization methods for neural quantum states (NQSs) based on deep neural networks have shown great potential for improving computational accuracy over traditional methods, but they inevitably introduce the challenge of substantial computational costs. To address this challenge, this study proposed expectation–maximization-based optimization of NQS (EMO-NQS), a novel method developed to accelerate optimizations through cost amortization. Specifically, the EMO-NQS method reformulates time-intensive operations as the E-step, amortizing their costs through replays of efficient network-updating operations in the M-step to reduce the overall computational load. Furthermore, an active learning (AL)-based sampling method was introduced to enhance the robustness of EMO-NQS. The performance of EMO-NQS was validated by optimizing the NQS of the equilibrium structures for various molecules. The results demonstrated that EMO-NQS achieved optimization speeds at least twice as fast as those of the vanilla NQS method without compromising accuracy. Furthermore, the consistent acceleration of optimization and the robustness of accuracy facilitated by the AL-based EMO-NQS method were demonstrated by an additional optimization of the construction of the potential energy surface of the N 2 molecule.
Accurate solutions for ab initio quantum chemistry are critical for understanding chemistry on the atomic scale. Recently, optimization methods for neural quantum states (NQSs) based on deep neural networks have shown great potential for improving computational accuracy over traditional methods, but they inevitably introduce the challenge of substantial computational costs. To address this challenge, this study proposed expectation–maximization-based optimization of NQS (EMO-NQS), a novel method developed to accelerate optimizations through cost amortization. Specifically, the EMO-NQS method reformulates time-intensive operations as the E-step, amortizing their costs through replays of efficient network-updating operations in the M-step to reduce the overall computational load. Furthermore, an active learning (AL)-based sampling method was introduced to enhance the robustness of EMO-NQS. The performance of EMO-NQS was validated by optimizing the NQS of the equilibrium structures for various molecules. The results demonstrated that EMO-NQS achieved optimization speeds at least twice as fast as those of the vanilla NQS method without compromising accuracy. Furthermore, the consistent acceleration of optimization and the robustness of accuracy facilitated by the AL-based EMO-NQS method were demonstrated by an additional optimization of the construction of the potential energy surface of the N 2 molecule.
The ground state of second-quantized quantum chemistry Hamiltonians is key to determining molecular properties. Neural quantum states (NQS) offer flexible and expressive wavefunction ansatze for this task but face two main challenges: highly peaked ground-state wavefunctions hinder efficient sampling, and local energy evaluations scale quartically with system size, incurring significant computational costs. In this work, we overcome these challenges by introducing a suite of algorithmic enhancements, which includes efficient periodic compact subspace construction, truncated local energy evaluations, improved stochastic sampling, and physics-informed modifications. Applying these techniques to the neural network backflow (NNBF) ansatz, we demonstrate significant gains in both accuracy and scalability. Our enhanced method surpasses traditional quantum chemistry methods like CCSD and CCSD(T), outperforms other NQS approaches, and achieves competitive energies with state-of-the-art ab initio techniques such as HCI, ASCI, FCIQMC, and DMRG. A series of ablation and comparative studies quantifies the contribution of each enhancement to the observed improvements in accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, we investigate the representational capacity of the ansatz, finding that its performance correlates with the inverse participation ratio (IPR), with more delocalized states being more challenging to approximate.
The ground state of second-quantized quantum chemistry Hamiltonians is key to determining molecular properties. Neural quantum states (NQSs) offer flexible and expressive wave-function Ans\"atze for this task but face two main challenges: highly peaked ground-state wave functions hinder efficient sampling, and local energy evaluations scale quartically with system size, incurring significant computational costs. In this work, we overcome these challenges by introducing a suite of algorithmic enhancements, which includes efficient periodic compact subspace construction, truncated local energy evaluations, improved stochastic sampling, and physics-informed modifications. Applying these techniques to the neural network backflow Ansatz, we demonstrate significant gains in both accuracy and scalability. Our enhanced method surpasses traditional quantum chemistry methods like coupled cluster singles and doubles (CCSD) and CCSD and perturbative triples [CCSD(T)], outperforms other NQS approaches, and achieves competitive energies with state-of-the-art ab initio techniques such as heat-bath configuration interaction, adaptive sampling configuration interaction, full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo, and density matrix renormalization group. A series of ablation and comparative studies quantifies the contribution of each enhancement to the observed improvements in accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, we investigate the representational capacity of the Ansatz, finding that its performance correlates with the inverse participation ratio, with more delocalized states being more challenging to approximate.
Neural-network quantum states (NQS) employ artificial neural networks to encode many-body wave functions in a second quantization through variational Monte Carlo (VMC). They have recently been applied to accurately describe electronic wave functions of molecules and have shown the challenges in efficiency compared with traditional quantum chemistry methods. Here, we introduce a general nonstochastic optimization algorithm for NQS in chemical systems, which deterministically generates a selected set of important configurations simultaneously with energy evaluation of NQS. This method bypasses the need for Markov-chain Monte Carlo within the VMC framework, thereby accelerating the entire optimization process. Furthermore, this newly developed nonstochastic optimization algorithm for NQS offers comparable or superior accuracy compared to its stochastic counterpart and ensures more stable convergence. The application of this model to test molecules exhibiting strong electron correlations provides further insight into the performance of NQS in chemical systems and opens avenues for future enhancements.
Abstract Variational optimization of neural-network representations of quantum states has been successfully applied to solve interacting fermionic problems. Despite rapid developments, significant scalability challenges arise when considering molecules of large scale, which correspond to non-locally interacting quantum spin Hamiltonians consisting of sums of thousands or even millions of Pauli operators. In this work, we introduce scalable parallelization strategies to improve neural-network-based variational quantum Monte Carlo calculations for ab-initio quantum chemistry applications. We establish GPU-supported local energy parallelism to compute the optimization objective for Hamiltonians of potentially complex molecules. Using autoregressive sampling techniques, we demonstrate systematic improvement in wall-clock timings required to achieve coupled cluster with up to double excitations baseline target energies. The performance is further enhanced by accommodating the structure of resultant spin Hamiltonians into the autoregressive sampling ordering. The algorithm achieves promising performance in comparison with the classical approximate methods and exhibits both running time and scalability advantages over existing neural-network based methods.
The field of quantum chemistry has long been defined by the central computational challenge of the quantum many-body fermionic system problem, main the electronic Schrödinger equation. This exponential scaling makes it computationally intractable to solve, the exact governing electronic Schrödinger equation. Approximation methods have been developed, ranging from the widely used Density Functional Theory (DFT) to Coupled Cluster (CC) theory. While powerful, these conventional approaches often involve controlled truncations which caused a trade-off between accuracy, leaving many systems—particularly those with strong electron correlation—beyond the reach of ab initio simulation. Furthermore, the famous fermionic sign oscillation problem is particularly severe in stochastic methods like Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC). 1 Traditional Ansätze are also frequently engineered specifically for particular systems, which results in a fragmentation of results and fundamentally limits the transferability. Recent research demonstrates that with carefully designed architectures, ANNs can not only represent ground states of model systems with high precision but also tackle the sign problem, offering a promising path forward for strongly correlated electronic structure calculations.2,3 This review charts the paradigm shift driven by Neural Network Quantum States (NNQS), which leverage the representational power of deep learning to overcome these barriers. We detail the architectural evolution from Restricted Boltzmann Machines to autoregressive models like RNNs and Transformers, which enable exact, uncorrelated sampling and bypass critical bottlenecks.2,4,5Furthermore, we explore the geometric foundation of high-efficiency optimization via the neural networks, which decouples optimization cost from model complexity.6 The frontier of the field is marked by the integration of operator learning and hybrid quantum-classical frameworks, such as Reinforcement Learning for contracted quantum eigen-solvers and Quantum-Enhanced Neural Networks, which leverage quantum processors to enhance expressivity for hardware-efficient Ansätze.7,8 By framing the problem through the lens of computational resource allocation—specifically, trading exponential memory demands for polynomialcomplexity optimization and sampling—this review elucidates how recent advances at the intersection of artificial neural networks and quantum computing have evolved. The emergence of those methods not merely progress into a powerful simulation-tools, but also a hybrid computational interface.9 This convergence offers a versatile and systematically improvable framework for potentially addressing some of the most challenging problems in quantum physics and chemistry.
Solving quantum many-body problems is one of the fundamental challenges in quantum chemistry. While neural network quantum states (NQS) have emerged as a promising computational tool, its training process incurs exponentially growing computational demands, becoming prohibitively expensive for large-scale molecular systems and creating fundamental scalability barriers for real-world applications. To address the above challenges, we present QChem-Trainer, a highperformance NQS training framework for ab initio electronic structure calculations. First, we propose a scalable sampling parallelism strategy with multi-layer workload division and hybrid sampling scheme, which breaks the scalability barriers in large-scale NQS training. Second, we introduce multi-level energy calculation parallelism, enabling more efficient local energy computation in NQS training. Last, we employ cachecentric optimization for transformer-based ansatz and incorporate it with sampling parallelism strategy, which further accelerates the NQS training and achieves stable memory footprints at scale. Experiments demonstrate that QChem-Trainer provides up to8.41×speedup in NQS training and attains a parallel efficiency of up to 95.8% when scaling to 1,536 nodes.