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Main Authors: Qi, Zihao, Earls, Christopher
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07937
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author Qi, Zihao
Earls, Christopher
author_facet Qi, Zihao
Earls, Christopher
contents The Universal Operator Growth Hypothesis formulates time evolution of operators through Lanczos coefficients. In practice, however, numerical instability and memory cost limit the number of coefficients that can be computed exactly. In response to these challenges, the standard approach relies on fitting early coefficients to asymptotic forms, but such procedures can miss subleading, history-dependent structures in the coefficients that subsequently affect reconstructed observables. In this work, we treat the Lanczos coefficients as a causal time sequence and introduce a transformer-based model to autoregressively predict future Lanczos coefficients from short prefixes. For both classical and quantum systems, our machine-learning model outperforms asymptotic fits, in both coefficient extrapolation and physical observable reconstruction, by achieving an order-of-magnitude reduction in error. Our model also transfers across system sizes: it can be trained on smaller systems and then be used to extrapolate coefficients on a larger system without retraining. By probing the learned attention patterns and performing targeted attention ablations, we identify which portions of the coefficient history are most influential for accurate forecasts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_07937
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Attention in Krylov Space
Qi, Zihao
Earls, Christopher
Quantum Physics
Statistical Mechanics
The Universal Operator Growth Hypothesis formulates time evolution of operators through Lanczos coefficients. In practice, however, numerical instability and memory cost limit the number of coefficients that can be computed exactly. In response to these challenges, the standard approach relies on fitting early coefficients to asymptotic forms, but such procedures can miss subleading, history-dependent structures in the coefficients that subsequently affect reconstructed observables. In this work, we treat the Lanczos coefficients as a causal time sequence and introduce a transformer-based model to autoregressively predict future Lanczos coefficients from short prefixes. For both classical and quantum systems, our machine-learning model outperforms asymptotic fits, in both coefficient extrapolation and physical observable reconstruction, by achieving an order-of-magnitude reduction in error. Our model also transfers across system sizes: it can be trained on smaller systems and then be used to extrapolate coefficients on a larger system without retraining. By probing the learned attention patterns and performing targeted attention ablations, we identify which portions of the coefficient history are most influential for accurate forecasts.
title Attention in Krylov Space
topic Quantum Physics
Statistical Mechanics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07937