The solution of problems in physics is often facilitated by a change of variables. In this work we present neural transformations to learn symmetries of Hamiltonian mechanical systems. Maintaining the Hamiltonian structure requires novel network architectures that parametrize symplectic transformations. We demonstrate the utility of these architectures by learning the structure of integrable models. Our work exemplifies the adaptation of neural transformations to a family constrained by more than the condition of invertibility, which we expect to be a common feature of applications of these methods.
It is demonstrated that the so-called unavoidable quantum anomalies can be avoided in the farmework of a special non-linear quantization scheme. A simple example is discussed in detail.
We study the relationship between the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) and the underlying symmetries of the objective function to be optimized. Our approach formalizes the connection between quantum symmetry properties of the QAOA dynamics and the group of classical symmetries of the objective function. The connection is general and includes but is not limited to problems defined on graphs. We show a series of results exploring the connection and highlight examples of hard problem classes where a nontrivial symmetry subgroup can be obtained efficiently. In particular we show how classical objective function symmetries lead to invariant measurement outcome probabilities across states connected by such symmetries, independent of the choice of algorithm parameters or number of layers. To illustrate the power of the developed connection, we apply machine learning techniques towards predicting QAOA performance based on symmetry considerations. We provide numerical evidence that a small set of graph symmetry properties suffices to predict the minimum QAOA depth required to achieve a target approximation ratio on the MaxCut problem, in a practically important setting where QAOA parameter schedules are constrained to be linear and hence easier to optimize.
We analyze several integrable systems in zero-curvature form within the framework of $SL(2,R)$ invariant gauge theory. In the Drienfeld-Sokolov gauge we derive a two-parameter family of nonlinear evolution equations which as special cases include the Kortweg-de Vries (KdV) and Harry Dym equations. We find residual gauge transformations which lead to infinintesimal symmetries of this family of equations. For KdV and Harry Dym equations we find an infinite hierarchy of such symmetry transformations, and we investigate their relation with local conservation laws, constants of the motion and the bi-Hamiltonian structure of the equations. Applying successive gauge transformatinos of Miura type we obtain a sequence of gauge equivalent integrable systems, among them the modified KdV and Calogero KdV equations.
Iterative solvers are widely used to accurately simulate physical systems. These solvers require initial guesses to generate a sequence of improving approximate solutions. In this contribution, we introduce a novel method to accelerate iterative solvers for physical systems with graph networks (GNs) by predicting the initial guesses to reduce the number of iterations. Unlike existing methods that aim to learn physical systems in an end-to-end manner, our approach guarantees long-term stability and therefore leads to more accurate solutions. Furthermore, our method improves the run time performance of traditional iterative solvers. To explore our method we make use of position-based dynamics (PBD) as a common solver for physical systems and evaluate it by simulating the dynamics of elastic rods. Our approach is able to generalize across different initial conditions, discretizations, and realistic material properties. Finally, we demonstrate that our method also performs well when taking discontinuous effects into account such as collisions between individual rods. Finally, to illustrate the scalability of our approach, we simulate complex 3D tree models composed of over a thousand individual branch segments swaying in wind fields. A video showing dynamic results of our graph learning assisted simulations of elastic rods can be found on the project website available at http://computationalsciences.org/publications/shao-2021-physical-systems-graph-learning.html .
We analyze the relation of the notion of a pluri-Lagrangian system, which recently emerged in the theory of integrable systems, to the classical notion of variational symmetry, due to E. Noether. We treat classical mechanical systems and show that, for any Lagrangian system with $m$ commuting variational symmetries, one can construct a pluri-Lagrangian 1-form in the $(m+1)$-dimensional time, whose multi-time Euler-Lagrange equations coincide with the original system supplied with $m$ commuting evolutionary flows corresponding to the variational symmetries. We also give a Hamiltonian counterpart of this construction, leading, for any system of commuting Hamiltonian flows, to a pluri-Lagrangian 1-form with coefficients depending on functions in the phase space.