No Arabic abstract
The search for novel entangled phases of matter has lead to the recent discovery of a new class of ``entanglement transitions, exemplified by random tensor networks and monitored quantum circuits. Most known examples can be understood as some classical ordering transitions in an underlying statistical mechanics model, where entanglement maps onto the free energy cost of inserting a domain wall. In this paper, we study the possibility of entanglement transitions driven by physics beyond such statistical mechanics mappings. Motivated by recent applications of neural network-inspired variational Ansatze, we investigate under what conditions on the variational parameters these Ansatze can capture an entanglement transition. We study the entanglement scaling of short-range restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) quantum states with random phases. For uncorrelated random phases, we analytically demonstrate the absence of an entanglement transition and reveal subtle finite size effects in finite size numerical simulations. Introducing phases with correlations decaying as $1/r^alpha$ in real space, we observe three regions with a different scaling of entanglement entropy depending on the exponent $alpha$. We study the nature of the transition between these regions, finding numerical evidence for critical behavior. Our work establishes the presence of long-range correlated phases in RBM-based wave functions as a required ingredient for entanglement transitions.
Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM) are bi-layer neural networks used for the unsupervised learning of model distributions from data. The bipartite architecture of RBM naturally defines an elegant sampling procedure, called Alternating Gibbs Sampling (AGS), where the configurations of the latent-variable layer are sampled conditional to the data-variable layer, and vice versa. We study here the performance of AGS on several analytically tractable models borrowed from statistical mechanics. We show that standard AGS is not more efficient than classical Metropolis-Hastings (MH) sampling of the effective energy landscape defined on the data layer. However, RBM can identify meaningful representations of training data in their latent space. Furthermore, using these representations and combining Gibbs sampling with the MH algorithm in the latent space can enhance the sampling performance of the RBM when the hidden units encode weakly dependent features of the data. We illustrate our findings on three datasets: Bars and Stripes and MNIST, well known in machine learning, and the so-called Lattice Proteins, introduced in theoretical biology to study the sequence-to-structure mapping in proteins.
Restricted Boltzmann machines are undirected neural networks which have been shown to be effective in many applications, including serving as initializations for training deep multi-layer neural networks. One of the main reasons for their success is the existence of efficient and practical stochastic algorithms, such as contrastive divergence, for unsupervised training. We propose an alternative deterministic iterative procedure based on an improved mean field method from statistical physics known as the Thouless-Anderson-Palmer approach. We demonstrate that our algorithm provides performance equal to, and sometimes superior to, persistent contrastive divergence, while also providing a clear and easy to evaluate objective function. We believe that this strategy can be easily generalized to other models as well as to more accurate higher-order approximations, paving the way for systematic improvements in training Boltzmann machines with hidden units.
Monitored quantum circuits can exhibit an entanglement transition as a function of the rate of measurements, stemming from the competition between scrambling unitary dynamics and disentangling projective measurements. We study how entanglement dynamics in non-unitary quantum circuits can be enriched in the presence of charge conservation, using a combination of exact numerics and a mapping onto a statistical mechanics model of constrained hard-core random walkers. We uncover a charge-sharpening transition that separates different scrambling phases with volume-law scaling of entanglement, distinguished by whether measurements can efficiently reveal the total charge of the system. We find that while Renyi entropies grow sub-ballistically as $sqrt{t}$ in the absence of measurement, for even an infinitesimal rate of measurements, all average Renyi entropies grow ballistically with time $sim t$. We study numerically the critical behavior of the charge-sharpening and entanglement transitions in U(1) circuits, and show that they exhibit emergent Lorentz invariance and can also be diagnosed using scalable local ancilla probes. Our statistical mechanical mapping technique readily generalizes to arbitrary Abelian groups, and offers a general framework for studying dissipatively-stabilized symmetry-breaking and topological orders.
The restricted Boltzmann machine is a network of stochastic units with undirected interactions between pairs of visible and hidden units. This model was popularized as a building block of deep learning architectures and has continued to play an important role in applied and theoretical machine learning. Restricted Boltzmann machines carry a rich structure, with connections to geometry, applied algebra, probability, statistics, machine learning, and other areas. The analysis of these models is attractive in its own right and also as a platform to combine and generalize mathematical tools for graphical models with hidden variables. This article gives an introduction to the mathematical analysis of restricted Boltzmann machines, reviews recent results on the geometry of the sets of probability distributions representable by these models, and suggests a few directions for further investigation.
We propose a novel quantum model for the restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), in which the visible units remain classical whereas the hidden units are quantized as noninteracting fermions. The free motion of the fermions is parametrically coupled to the classical signal of the visible units. This model possesses a quantum behaviour such as coherences between the hidden units. Numerical experiments show that this fact makes it more powerful than the classical RBM with the same number of hidden units. At the same time, a significant advantage of the proposed model over the other approaches to the Quantum Boltzmann Machine (QBM) is that it is exactly solvable and efficiently trainable on a classical computer: there is a closed expression for the log-likelihood gradient with respect to its parameters. This fact makes it interesting not only as a model of a hypothetical quantum simulator, but also as a quantum-inspired classical machine-learning algorithm.