Looking elsewhere: improving variational Monte Carlo gradients by importance sampling

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Misery, Antoine, Gravina, Luca, Santini, Alessandro, Vicentini, Filippo
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866911044527456256
author Misery, Antoine
Gravina, Luca
Santini, Alessandro
Vicentini, Filippo
author_facet Misery, Antoine
Gravina, Luca
Santini, Alessandro
Vicentini, Filippo
contents Neural-network quantum states (NQS) offer a powerful and expressive ansatz for representing quantum many-body wave functions. However, their training via Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) methods remains challenging. It is well known that some scenarios - such as sharply peaked wave functions emerging in quantum chemistry - lead to high-variance gradient estimators hindering the effectiveness of variational optimizations. In this work we investigate a systematic strategy to tackle those sampling issues by means of adaptively tuned importance sampling. Our approach is explicitly designed to (i) target the gradient estimator instead of the loss function, (ii) not introduce additional hyperparameters and (iii) be computationally inexpensive. We benchmarked our approach across the ground-state search of a wide variety of hamiltonians, including frustrated spin systems and ab-initio quantum chemistry. We also show systematic improvements on the infidelity minimization in the context of neural projected quantum dynamics. Overall, our approach can reduce the computational cost of vanilla VMC considerably, up to a factor of 100x when targeting highly peaked quantum chemistry wavefunctions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_05352
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Looking elsewhere: improving variational Monte Carlo gradients by importance sampling
Misery, Antoine
Gravina, Luca
Santini, Alessandro
Vicentini, Filippo
Quantum Physics
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Statistical Mechanics
Strongly Correlated Electrons
Neural-network quantum states (NQS) offer a powerful and expressive ansatz for representing quantum many-body wave functions. However, their training via Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) methods remains challenging. It is well known that some scenarios - such as sharply peaked wave functions emerging in quantum chemistry - lead to high-variance gradient estimators hindering the effectiveness of variational optimizations. In this work we investigate a systematic strategy to tackle those sampling issues by means of adaptively tuned importance sampling. Our approach is explicitly designed to (i) target the gradient estimator instead of the loss function, (ii) not introduce additional hyperparameters and (iii) be computationally inexpensive. We benchmarked our approach across the ground-state search of a wide variety of hamiltonians, including frustrated spin systems and ab-initio quantum chemistry. We also show systematic improvements on the infidelity minimization in the context of neural projected quantum dynamics. Overall, our approach can reduce the computational cost of vanilla VMC considerably, up to a factor of 100x when targeting highly peaked quantum chemistry wavefunctions.
title Looking elsewhere: improving variational Monte Carlo gradients by importance sampling
topic Quantum Physics
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Statistical Mechanics
Strongly Correlated Electrons
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05352