Statistical physics through the lens of real-space mutual information

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Gökmen, Doruk Efe, Ringel, Zohar, Huber, Sebastian D., Koch-Janusz, Maciej
Format: Preprint
Published: 2021
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author Gökmen, Doruk Efe
Ringel, Zohar
Huber, Sebastian D.
Koch-Janusz, Maciej
author_facet Gökmen, Doruk Efe
Ringel, Zohar
Huber, Sebastian D.
Koch-Janusz, Maciej
contents Identifying the relevant coarse-grained degrees of freedom in a complex physical system is a key stage in developing powerful effective theories in and out of equilibrium. The celebrated renormalization group provides a framework for this task, but its practical execution in unfamiliar systems is fraught with ad hoc choices, whereas machine learning approaches, though promising, often lack formal interpretability. Recently, the optimal coarse-graining in a statistical system was shown to exist, based on a universal, but computationally difficult information-theoretic variational principle. This limited its applicability to but the simplest systems; moreover, the relation to standard formalism of field theory was unclear. Here we present an algorithm employing state-of-art results in machine-learning-based estimation of information-theoretic quantities, overcoming these challenges. We use this advance to develop a new paradigm in identifying the most relevant field theory operators describing properties of the system, going beyond the existing approaches to real-space renormalization. We evidence its power on an interacting model, where the emergent degrees of freedom are qualitatively different from the microscopic building blocks of the theory. Our results push the boundary of formally interpretable applications of machine learning, conceptually paving the way towards automated theory building.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2101_11633
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Statistical physics through the lens of real-space mutual information
Gökmen, Doruk Efe
Ringel, Zohar
Huber, Sebastian D.
Koch-Janusz, Maciej
Statistical Mechanics
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Identifying the relevant coarse-grained degrees of freedom in a complex physical system is a key stage in developing powerful effective theories in and out of equilibrium. The celebrated renormalization group provides a framework for this task, but its practical execution in unfamiliar systems is fraught with ad hoc choices, whereas machine learning approaches, though promising, often lack formal interpretability. Recently, the optimal coarse-graining in a statistical system was shown to exist, based on a universal, but computationally difficult information-theoretic variational principle. This limited its applicability to but the simplest systems; moreover, the relation to standard formalism of field theory was unclear. Here we present an algorithm employing state-of-art results in machine-learning-based estimation of information-theoretic quantities, overcoming these challenges. We use this advance to develop a new paradigm in identifying the most relevant field theory operators describing properties of the system, going beyond the existing approaches to real-space renormalization. We evidence its power on an interacting model, where the emergent degrees of freedom are qualitatively different from the microscopic building blocks of the theory. Our results push the boundary of formally interpretable applications of machine learning, conceptually paving the way towards automated theory building.
title Statistical physics through the lens of real-space mutual information
topic Statistical Mechanics
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.11633