Comparison between tensor methods and neural networks in electronic structure calculations

This article compares the tensor method density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) with two neural network based methods -namely FermiNet and PauliNet) for determining the ground state wavefunction of the many-body electronic Schrödinger problem. We provide numerical simulations illustrating the main features of the methods and showing convergence with respect to some parameter, such as the rank for DMRG, and number of pretraining iterations for neural networks. We then compare the obtained energy with the methods for a few atoms and molecules, for some of which the exact value of the energy is known for the sake of comparison. In the last part of the article, we propose a new kind of neural network to solve the Schrödinger problem based on the training of the wavefunction on a simplex, and an explicit permutation for evaluating the wavefunction on the whole space. We provide numerical results on a toy problem for the sake of illustration.