A Kaczmarz-inspired approach to accelerate the optimization of neural network wavefunctions

Neural network wavefunctions optimized using the variational Monte Carlo method have been shown to produce highly accurate results for the electronic structure of atoms and small molecules, but the high cost of optimizing such wavefunctions prevents their application to larger systems. We propose the Subsampled Projected-Increment Natural Gradient Descent (SPRING) optimizer to reduce this bottleneck. SPRING combines ideas from the recently introduced minimum-step stochastic reconfiguration optimizer (MinSR) and the classical randomized Kaczmarz method for solving linear least-squares problems. We demonstrate that SPRING outperforms both MinSR and the popular Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature method (KFAC) across a number of small atoms and molecules, given that the learning rates of all methods are optimally tuned. For example, on the oxygen atom, SPRING attains chemical accuracy after forty thousand training iterations, whereas both MinSR and KFAC fail to do so even after one hundred thousand iterations.

Convergence of stochastic gradient descent on parameterized sphere with applications to variational Monte Carlo simulation

We analyze stochastic gradient descent (SGD) type algorithms on a high-dimensional sphere which is parameterized by a neural network up to a normalization constant. We provide a new algorithm for the setting of supervised learning and show its convergence both theoretically and numerically. We also provide the first proof of convergence for the unsupervised setting, which corresponds to the widely used variational Monte Carlo (VMC) method in quantum physics.

Explicitly antisymmetrized neural network layers for variational Monte Carlo simulation

The combination of neural networks and quantum Monte Carlo methods has arisen as a path forward for highly accurate electronic structure calculations. Previous proposals have combined equivariant neural network layers with an antisymmetric layer to satisfy the antisymmetry requirements of the electronic wavefunction. However, to date it is unclear if one can represent antisymmetric functions of physical interest, and it is difficult to measure the expressiveness of the antisymmetric layer. This work attempts to address this problem by introducing explicitly antisymmetrized universal neural network layers as a diagnostic tool. We first introduce a generic antisymmetric (GA) layer, which we use to replace the entire antisymmetric layer of the highly accurate ansatz known as the FermiNet. We demonstrate that the resulting FermiNet-GA architecture can yield effectively the exact ground state energy for small systems. We then consider a factorized antisymmetric (FA) layer which more directly generalizes the FermiNet by replacing products of determinants with products of antisymmetrized neural networks. Interestingly, the resulting FermiNet-FA architecture does not outperform the FermiNet. This suggests that the sum of products of antisymmetries is a key limiting aspect of the FermiNet architecture. To explore this further, we investigate a slight modification of the FermiNet called the full determinant mode, which replaces each product of determinants with a single combined determinant. The full single-determinant FermiNet closes a large part of the gap between the standard single-determinant FermiNet and FermiNet-GA. Surprisingly, on the nitrogen molecule at a dissociating bond length of 4.0 Bohr, the full single-determinant FermiNet can significantly outperform the standard 64-determinant FermiNet, yielding an energy within 0.4 kcal/mol of the best available computational benchmark.