Momentum Stability and Adaptive Control in Stochastic Reconfiguration

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Hauptverfasser: Wang, Yuyang, Liu, Xin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Wang, Yuyang
Liu, Xin
author_facet Wang, Yuyang
Liu, Xin
contents Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) combined with expressive neural network wavefunctions has become a powerful route to high-accuracy ground-state calculations, yet its practical success hinges on efficient and stable wavefunction optimization. While stochastic reconfiguration (SR) provides a geometry-aware preconditioner motivated by imaginary-time evolution, its Kaczmarz-inspired variant, subsampled projected-increment natural gradient descent (SPRING), achieves state-of-the-art empirical performance. However, the effectiveness of SPRING is highly sensitive to the choice of a momentum-like parameter $μ$. The original sensitivity of $μ$ and the instability observed at $μ=1$, have remained unclear. In this work, we clarify the distinct mechanisms governing the regimes $μ<1$ and $μ=1$. We establish convergence guarantees for $0\leμ<1$ under mild assumptions, and construct counterexamples showing that $μ=1$ can induce divergence via uncontrolled growth along kernel-related directions when the step-size is not summable. Motivated by these theoretical insights and numerical observations, we further propose \textit{Principal Range Informed MomEntum SR} (PRIME-SR), a tuning-free momentum-adaptive SR method based on effective spectral dimension and subspace overlap. PRIME-SR achieves performance comparable to optimally tuned SPRING while significantly improving robustness in VMC optimization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_18357
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Momentum Stability and Adaptive Control in Stochastic Reconfiguration
Wang, Yuyang
Liu, Xin
Optimization and Control
Numerical Analysis
Computational Physics
Quantum Physics
Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) combined with expressive neural network wavefunctions has become a powerful route to high-accuracy ground-state calculations, yet its practical success hinges on efficient and stable wavefunction optimization. While stochastic reconfiguration (SR) provides a geometry-aware preconditioner motivated by imaginary-time evolution, its Kaczmarz-inspired variant, subsampled projected-increment natural gradient descent (SPRING), achieves state-of-the-art empirical performance. However, the effectiveness of SPRING is highly sensitive to the choice of a momentum-like parameter $μ$. The original sensitivity of $μ$ and the instability observed at $μ=1$, have remained unclear. In this work, we clarify the distinct mechanisms governing the regimes $μ<1$ and $μ=1$. We establish convergence guarantees for $0\leμ<1$ under mild assumptions, and construct counterexamples showing that $μ=1$ can induce divergence via uncontrolled growth along kernel-related directions when the step-size is not summable. Motivated by these theoretical insights and numerical observations, we further propose \textit{Principal Range Informed MomEntum SR} (PRIME-SR), a tuning-free momentum-adaptive SR method based on effective spectral dimension and subspace overlap. PRIME-SR achieves performance comparable to optimally tuned SPRING while significantly improving robustness in VMC optimization.
title Momentum Stability and Adaptive Control in Stochastic Reconfiguration
topic Optimization and Control
Numerical Analysis
Computational Physics
Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18357