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Main Authors: Huang, Kevin Han, Zhan, Ni, Ertekin, Elif, Orbanz, Peter, Adams, Ryan P.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05318
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author Huang, Kevin Han
Zhan, Ni
Ertekin, Elif
Orbanz, Peter
Adams, Ryan P.
author_facet Huang, Kevin Han
Zhan, Ni
Ertekin, Elif
Orbanz, Peter
Adams, Ryan P.
contents Incorporating group symmetries into neural networks has been a cornerstone of success in many AI-for-science applications. Diagonal groups of isometries, which describe the invariance under a simultaneous movement of multiple objects, arise naturally in many-body quantum problems. Despite their importance, diagonal groups have received relatively little attention, as they lack a natural choice of invariant maps except in special cases. We study different ways of incorporating diagonal invariance in neural network ansätze trained via variational Monte Carlo methods, and consider specifically data augmentation, group averaging and canonicalization. We show that, contrary to standard ML setups, in-training symmetrization destabilizes training and can lead to worse performance. Our theoretical and numerical results indicate that this unexpected behavior may arise from a unique computational-statistical tradeoff not found in standard ML analyses of symmetrization. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that post hoc averaging is less sensitive to such tradeoffs and emerges as a simple, flexible and effective method for improving neural network solvers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_05318
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Diagonal Symmetrization of Neural Network Solvers for the Many-Electron Schrödinger Equation
Huang, Kevin Han
Zhan, Ni
Ertekin, Elif
Orbanz, Peter
Adams, Ryan P.
Machine Learning
Materials Science
Incorporating group symmetries into neural networks has been a cornerstone of success in many AI-for-science applications. Diagonal groups of isometries, which describe the invariance under a simultaneous movement of multiple objects, arise naturally in many-body quantum problems. Despite their importance, diagonal groups have received relatively little attention, as they lack a natural choice of invariant maps except in special cases. We study different ways of incorporating diagonal invariance in neural network ansätze trained via variational Monte Carlo methods, and consider specifically data augmentation, group averaging and canonicalization. We show that, contrary to standard ML setups, in-training symmetrization destabilizes training and can lead to worse performance. Our theoretical and numerical results indicate that this unexpected behavior may arise from a unique computational-statistical tradeoff not found in standard ML analyses of symmetrization. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that post hoc averaging is less sensitive to such tradeoffs and emerges as a simple, flexible and effective method for improving neural network solvers.
title Diagonal Symmetrization of Neural Network Solvers for the Many-Electron Schrödinger Equation
topic Machine Learning
Materials Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05318