Collection Number S029
Collection Type Series
The adoption of machine learning (ML], into theoretical physics comes on the heels of an explosion of industry progress that started in 2012. Since that time, computer scientists have demonstrated that learning algorithms - those designed to respond and adapt to new data - provide an exceptionally powerful platform for tackling many difficult tasks in image recognition, natural language comprehension, game play and more. This new breed of ML algorithm has now conquered benchmarks previously thought to be decades away due to their high mathematical complexity. In the last several years, researchers at Perimeter have begun to examine machine learning algorithms for application to a new set of problems, including condensed matter, quantum information, numerical relativity, quantum gravity and astrophysics.

Quantum many-body dynamics in two dimensions with artificial neural networks

Markus Heyl Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems

In the last two decades the field of nonequilibrium quantum many-body physics
has seen a rapid development driven, in particular, by the remarkable progress
in quantum simulators, which today provide access to dynamics in quantum
matter with an unprecedented control. However, the efficient numerical
simulation of nonequilibrium real-time evolution in isolated quantum matter
still remains a key challenge for current computational methods especially
beyond one spatial dimension. In this talk I will present a versatile and

Controlling Majorana zero modes with machine learning

Luuk Coopmans Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies

Majorana zero modes have attracted much interest in recent years because of their promising properties for topological quantum computation. A key question in this regard is how fast two Majoranas can be exchanged giving rise to a unitary gate operation. In this presentation I will first explain that the transport of Majoranas in one-dimensional topological superconductors can be formulated as a “simple” optimal control optimization problem for which we propose several different control regimes.

Physical footprints of intrinsic sign problems

Zohar Ringel Hebrew University of Jerusalem


Phase Detection with Neural Networks: Interpreting the Black Box

Anna Dawid-Łękowska University of Warsaw

Neural networks (NNs) normally do not allow any insight into the reasoning behind their predictions. We demonstrate how inﬂuence functions can unravel the black box of NN when trained to predict the phases of the one-dimensional extended spinless Fermi-Hubbard model at half-ﬁlling. Results provide strong evidence that the NN correctly learns an order parameter describing the quantum transition.

Reinforcement Learning assisted Quantum Optimization

Matteo Wauters SISSA Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) scheme for feedback quantum control within the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). QAOA requires a variational minimization for states constructed by applying a sequence of unitary operators, depending on parameters living in a highly dimensional space. We reformulate such a minimum search as a learning task, where a RL agent chooses the control parameters for the unitaries, given partial information on the system. We show that our RL scheme learns a policy converging to the optimal adiabatic solution for QAOA found by Mbeng et al.

Aspect of Information in Classical and Quantum Neural Networks

Huitao Shen Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Department of Physics

I’ll talk about two independent works on classical and quantum neural networks connected by information theory. In the first part of the talk, I’ll treat sequence models as one-dimensional classical statistical mechanical systems and analyze the scaling behavior of mutual information. I'll provide a new perspective on why recurrent neural networks are not good at natural language processing. In the second part of the talk, I’ll study information scrambling dynamics when quantum neural networks are trained by classical gradient descent algorithm.

Meta-Learning Algorithms and their Applications to Quantum Computing

Meta-learning involves learning mathematical devices using problem instances as training data. In this talk, we first describe recent meta-learning approaches involving the learning of objects such as: initial weights, parameterized losses, hyper-parameter search strategies, and samplers. We then discuss learned optimizers in further detail and their applications towards optimizing variational circuits. This talk also covers some lessons learned starting a spin-off from academia.

Can we trust phase diagrams produced by artificial neural networks?

Sebastian Wetzel Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

So far artificial neural networks have been applied to discover phase diagrams in many different physical models. However, none of these studies have revealed any fundamentally new physics. A major problem is that these neural networks are mainly considered as black box algorithms. On the journey to detect new physics it is important to interpret what artificial neural networks learn. On the one hand this allows us to judge whether to trust the results, and on the other hand this can give us insight to possible new physics. In this talk I will 

Simulating quantum annealing via projective quantum Monte Carlo algorithms

Estelle Maeva Inack Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

We implement projective quantum Monte Carlo (PQMC) methods to simulate quantum annealing on classical computers. We show that in the regime where the systematic errors are well controlled, PQMC algorithms are capable of simulating the imaginary-time dynamics of the Schroedinger equation both on continuous space models and discrete basis systems. We also demonstrate that the tunneling time of the PQMC method is quadratically faster than the one of incoherent quantum annealing.