Learning Hard Quantum Distributions with Generative Neural Networks

Quantum computing has the potential to revolutionize numerous aspects of science and engineering, and extensive research in the past decades has been undertaken to exhibit quantum advantage over classical computers. Nevertheless, building robust quantum computers involves enormous technological challenges, and therefore many attempts are devoted to closing the gaps by developing classical simulation algorithms for problems in many body physics. Among these, the most notable are machine learning algorithms. This paper contributes to the development of these toolkits by studying the power of deep generative neural networks, including variational autoencoders and normalizing flows, to represent the distributions generated by quantum computing. The results show that these modern generative networks are only capable of partially capturing features of the quantum system including the overall distribution shapes, but missing the granularities such as local spikes and annihilations in the distributions This incomplete information reconstruction might be due to the inherent limitation of the classical algorithms when encountering the complex quantum states with the exponential growing Hilbert space. The results also show that variational autoencoders perform slightly better than normalizing flows for many cases, and the complimentary strength between the expressibility of variational autoencoders and normalizing flows is observed and worth further exploration.