mlqp-journal-club

ML and (Quantum) Physics Journal Club

This is an online journal club that discusses topics at the interface of machine learning and (quantum) physics.

To subscribe to the mailing list, follow this link.

Format

The format is informal, and based on:

Current schedule (Winter 2025/26)

Oct 24 Quantum Engineering of Qudits with Interpretable Machine Learning
Presenter: Martina / Devil’s advocate: Mo, Oleksii

Oct 31 No journal club; Happy Halloween!

Nov 7 Learning interactions between Rydberg atoms
Presenter: Yifan / Devil’s advocate: Mykola

Nov 14 Accurate Computation of Quantum Excited States with Neural Networks
Presenter: Attila / Devil’s advocates: Adrien, Douglas

Nov 21 Variational subspace methods and application to improving variational Monte Carlo dynamics
Presenter: Adrien

Nov 28 Grassmann Variational Monte Carlo with neural wave functions
Presenter: Douglas

Dec 5 Adaptive Neural Quantum States: A Recurrent Neural Network Perspective
Presenter: Kedir / Devil’s advocate: Wladi, Noe

Dec 12 Neural Network-Augmented Pfaffian Wave-functions for Scalable Simulations of Interacting Fermions
Presenter: Antoine / Devil’s advocate: Adrien

Dec 19 No journal club; Merry Christmas!

Jan 9 No journal club

Jan 16 Adversarial Policies Beat Superhuman Go AIs
Presenter: Moksh / Devil’s advocate: Giovanni

Jan 23 Breaking Through Barren Plateaus: Reinforcement Learning Initializations for Deep Variational Quantum Circuits
Presenter: Giovanni / Devil’s advocate: Moksh

Jan 30 Dynamics of disordered quantum systems with two- and three-dimensional tensor networks
Presenter: Wladi / Devil’s advocate: Attila

Feb 6 Fourier Neural Operators for Time-Periodic Quantum Systems: Learning Floquet Hamiltonians, Observable Dynamics, and Operator Growth
Presenter: Noe / Devil’s advocate: Oleksii

History

Summer 2025

Apr 25 Tackling Decision Processes with Non-Cumulative Objectives using Reinforcement Learning
Presenter: Hans / Devil’s advocate: Oleksii

May 2 Reinforcement learning to learn quantum states for Heisenberg scaling accuracy
Presenter: Paul / Devil’s advocate: Giovanni

May 9 Artificially intelligent Maxwell’s demon for optimal control of open quantum systems
Presenter: Mo / Devil’s advocate: Patrick

May 16 Scaling the Automated Discovery of Quantum Circuits via Reinforcement Learning with Gadgets
Presenter: Giovanni / Devil’s advocate: Antoine

May 23 Graph NNs, A General Introduction 1: https://distill.pub/2021/gnn-intro/, https://gnn.seas.upenn.edu/, https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01261
Presenter: Martina

May 30 Graph NNs applications: Gauging tensor networks with belief propagation
Presenter: Wladi / Devil’s advocate: Hans

Jun 6 Local minima in quantum systems
Presenter: Marc / Devil’s advocate: Martina

Jun 13 Universal scaling laws in quantum-probabilistic machine learning by tensor network towards interpreting representation and generalization powers
Presenter: Patrick / Devil’s advocate: Wladi

Jun 20 Provably efficient machine learning for quantum many-body problems
Presenter: Oleksii / Devil’s advocate: tbd

Jun 27 A learning-based approach to characterization of open quantum systems
Presenter: Noe / Devil’s advocate: Paul

Jul 4 Foundation Neural-Network Quantum States
Presenter: Adrien / Devil’s advocate: Noe

Jul 11 Many-body dynamics with explicitly time-dependent neural quantum states
Presenter: Kadir / Devil’s advocate: Adrien

Jul 18 Efficient Optimization of Variational Autoregressive Networks with Natural Gradient
Presenter: Antoine / Devil’s advocate: Kadir

Jul 25 Wasserstein Quantum Monte Carlo: A Novel Approach for Solving the Quantum Many-Body Schrödinger Equation
Presenter: Rajah / Devil’s advocate: Mo

Winter 2024/25

Oct 18: Learning eigenstates of quantum many-body Hamiltonians within the symmetric subspaces using neural network quantum states - Presenter: Adrien / Devil’s advocate: Ahmedeo, Ege

Oct 25: Accurate neural quantum states for interacting lattice bosons - Presenter: Viktor / Devil’s advocate: Giovanni

Nov 8: Tensor Network Computations That Capture Strict Variationality, Volume Law Behavior, and the Efficient Representation of Neural Network States Presenter: Hans / Devil’s advocate: Rajah

Nov 15: Approximately-symmetric neural networks for quantum spin liquids - Presenter: Rajah / Devil’s advocate: Viktor, Onurcan

Nov 22: Machine learning-based compression of quantum many body physics: PCA and autoencoder representation of the vertex function - Presenter: Ege / Devil’s advocate: Patrick

Nov 29: Vision Transformer Neural Quantum States for Impurity Models - Presenter: Ahmedeo / Devil’s advocate: Francesca, Jonas

Dec 6: Tutorial 1 Kolmogorov-Arnold networks - Presenter: Attila

Dec 13: Tutorial 2 Kolmogorov-Arnold networks - Presenter: Aleksei

Jan 10: Accurate Learning of Equivariant Quantum Systems from a Single Ground State - Presenter: Paul / Devil’s advocate: Aleksei, Adrien

Jan 17: Attention to Quantum Complexity - Presenter: Francesco / Devil’s advocate: Martina, Mo

Jan 24: Measurement-based quantum machine learning - Presenter: Fabian / Devil’s advocate: Francesco

Jan 31: The statistical mechanics and machine learning of the α-Rényi ensemble - Presenter: Francesca / Devil’s advocate: Fabian

Feb 7: Discovering Local Hidden-Variable Models for Arbitrary Multipartite Entangled States and Arbitrary Measurements - Presenter: Onurcan / Devil’s advocate: Patrick

Summer 2024

New component this term: Besides the presenter, a devil’s advocate is assigned to each paper. The job is to pose 2-3 critical questions at the end of the presentation, in order to kick off the discussion. The advocates are listed in parenthesis below.

We meet on Fridays at 4pm (CEST; CET from November on) via zoom. Connection details are distributed via the mailing list.

Apr 26: Model-Free Quantum Control with Reinforcement Learning - Giovanni Cemin (Felix Motzoi)

May 3: Reinforcement learning decoders for fault-tolerant quantum computation - Chris Hooley (Marin Bukov)

May 10: Real-time quantum error correction beyond break-even - Manuel Guatto (??)

May 17: Learning to Decode the Surface Code with a Recurrent, Transformer-Based Neural Network - Adrien Kahn (Markus Schmitt)

May 24: Neural Decoder for Topological Codes - Rajah Nutakki (Giovanni Cemin)

May 31: Retrieving non-stabilizerness with Neural Networks - Wladi Krinitsin (Chris Hooley)

June 7: Hybrid discrete-continuous compilation of trapped-ion quantum circuits with deep reinforcement learning - Francesco Preti

June 14: Neural Ordinary Differential Equations - Martina Jung (Marc Machaczek)

June 21: Fourier Neural Operator for Parametric Partial Differential Equations - Aleksei Malyshev (Fabian Ballar)

June 28: Operator Learning Renormalization Group (I) - Patrick Lenggenhager

July 5: Operator Learning Renormalization Group (II) - Jonas Rigo (Carlos Benavides)

July 12: Flow-based generative models for Markov chain Monte Carlo in lattice field theory - Ao Chen (Martina Jung)

July 19: Spin-1/2 kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet: Machine learning discovery of the spinon pair density wave ground state - Roeland Wiersema (Rajah Nutakki)

Winter 2023/24

We meet on Fridays at 4pm (CEST; CET from November on) via zoom. Connection details are distributed via the mailing list.

Neural quantum states

Oct 20: “Highly resolved spectral functions of two-dimensional systems with neural quantum states” - Markus Schmitt

Oct 27: Solving Schrödinger Equation with a Language Model - Mo Abedi

Nov 3: Backflow Transformations via Neural Networks for Quantum Many-Body Wave-Functions - Ankit Mahajan

Nov 10: Autoregressive Neural TensorNet: Bridging Neural Networks and Tensor Networks for Quantum Many-Body Simulation - Friederike Metz

Nov 17: Variational dynamics of open quantum systems in phase space - Zala Lenarcic

Nov 24: Efficient optimization of deep neural quantum states toward machine precision - Ao Chen

Dec 1: Mean-field theories are simple for neural quantum states - Fabian Ballar Trigueros

Diffusion models

Dec 8: Diffusion models tutorial 1 - Viktor Oganesyan

Dec 15: Diffusion models tutorial 2 - Viktor Oganesyan

Jan 12: skipped

Jan 19: Quantum-Noise-driven Generative Diffusion Models - Gianluca Lagnese

ML for Stat Mech and thermodynamics

Jan 26: Mutual Information, Neural Networks and the Renormalization Group - Jonas Rigo

Feb 2: Compression theory for inhomogeneous systems - Carlos

Feb 9: Mutual information of spin systems from autoregressive neural networks - Wladi Krinitisin

Feb 16: t.b.d. - Paolo Erdman

Summer 2023

First session on neural quantum states

Pedagogical sessions: Transformer models

Second session on neural quantum states