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Essentially No Energy Barrier Between Independent Fermionic Neural Quantum State Minima

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks 2026-01-13 v1 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics Strongly Correlated Electrons Computational Physics Quantum Physics

Abstract

Neural quantum states (NQS) have proven highly effective in representing quantum many-body wavefunctions, but their loss landscape remains poorly understood and debated. Here, we demonstrate that the NQS loss landscape is more benign and similar to conventional deep learning than previously thought, exhibiting mode connectivity: independently trained NQS are connected by paths in parameter space with essentially no energy barrier. To construct these paths, we develop GeoNEB, a path optimizer integrating efficient stochastic reconfiguration with the nudged elastic band method for constructing minimum energy paths. For the strongly interacting six-electron quantum dot modeled by a 1.61.6M-parameter Psiformer, we find two independent minima with expected energy barrier 105\sim10^{-5} times smaller than the system's overall energy scale and 103\sim10^{-3} times smaller than the linear path's barrier. The path respects physical symmetry in addition to achieving low energy, with the angular momentum remaining well quantized throughout. Our work is the first to construct optimized paths between independently trained NQS, and it suggests that the NQS loss landscape may not be as pathological as once feared.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.06939,
  title  = {Essentially No Energy Barrier Between Independent Fermionic Neural Quantum State Minima},
  author = {David D. Dai and Marin Soljačić},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.06939},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

8 pages, 7 figures