Fine-tuning Neural Network Quantum States

Abstract: Recent progress in the design and optimization of neural-network quantum states (NQSs) has made them an effective method to investigate ground-state properties of quantum many-body systems. In contrast to the standard approach of training a separate NQS from scratch at every point of the phase diagram, we demonstrate that the optimization of a NQS at a highly expressive point of the phase diagram (i.e., close to a phase transition) yields features that can be reused to accurately describe a wide region across the transition. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on different systems in one and two dimensions by initially pretraining a NQS at a given point of the phase diagram, followed by fine-tuning only the output layer for all other points. Notably, the computational cost of the fine-tuning step is very low compared to the pretraining stage. We argue that the reduced cost of this paradigm has significant potential to advance the exploration of strongly-correlated systems using NQS, mirroring the success of fine-tuning in machine learning and natural language processing.