Variational optimization of the amplitude of neural-network quantum many-body ground states

Neural-network quantum states (NQSs), variationally optimized by combining traditional methods and deep learning techniques, is a new way to find quantum many-body ground states and has gradually become a competitor of traditional variational methods. However, there are still some difficulties in the optimization of NQSs, such as local minima, slow convergence, and sign structure optimization. Here, we split a quantum many-body variational wave function into a multiplication of a real-valued amplitude neural network and a sign structure, and focus on the optimization of the amplitude network while keeping the sign structure fixed. The amplitude network is a convolutional neural network (CNN) with residual blocks, namely a residual network (ResNet). Our method is tested on three typical quantum many-body systems. The obtained ground state energies are better than or comparable to those from traditional variational Monte Carlo methods and density matrix renormalization group. Surprisingly, for the frustrated Heisenberg J₁-J₂ model, our results are better than those of the complex-valued CNN in the literature, implying that the sign structure of the complex-valued NQS is difficult to optimize. We will study the optimization of the sign structure of NQSs in the future.