# Tensor Networks: Putting Quantum Wavefunctions into Machine Learning

## Why tensor networks?

If you follow machine learning, you have definitely heard of neural networks. If you are a physicist, you may have heard of tensor networks too. Both are schemes for assembling simple units (neurons or tensors) into complicated functions: decision functions in the case of machine learning or wavefunctions in the case of quantum mechanics.

But tensor networks have only linear elements. Neural networks crucially require non-linear elements for their success (specifically, non-linear neuron activation functions). And neural networks have been so wildly successful in recent years that leading tech companies are staking their futures on them.

So why bother with linear tensor networks if non-linearity is the key to success?

The key is dimensionality. Problems which are difficult to solve in low dimensional spaces become easier when "lifted" into a higher dimensional space. Think how much easier your day would be if you could move freely in the extra dimension we call time. Data points hopelessly intertwined in their native, low-dimensional form can become linearly separable when given the extra breathing room of more dimensions.

But extra dimensions come at a steep price, known as the "curse of dimensionality". When constructing a high dimensional space from products of smaller spaces, its dimension grows exponentially. Optimizing even a linear classifier in an exponentially big space becomes costly very quickly.

This is the problem tensor networks solve: if you can live with a reduced set of linear transformations, then tensor networks let you manipulate objects in an exponentially high dimensional space easily and efficiently.

Tensor networks can do linear things within spaces so big, there's no reason they couldn't be as effective as neural networks, which do non-linear things to much smaller spaces. But whether they can really compete with neural nets remains to be seen!

## Tensor networks in physics

Quantum physicists have faced the challenges of exponentially large spaces since the days of Dirac. Wavefunctions describing the collective state of N quantum particles live in just such a high-dimensional space. For decades, approaches to deal with the huge size of quantum state space relied on using a modest set of ad-hoc variables to parameterize a large wavefunction, then optimizing these variables and hoping for the best. Or physicists would avoid wavefunctions altogether in favor of large-scale simulations of particle motions (e.g. quantum Monte Carlo methods).

But the exponential size of quantum wavefunction space turns out to be an illusion. The wavefunctions typically occurring in nature are just a tiny fraction of the huge mathematical space they belong to. And nearly all of this small corner of wavefunction space is within reach of tensor networks.

The first tensor network developed in the late 80's was the "matrix product state" or MPS. An MPS is a scheme to encode wavefunction amplitudes as the product of matrices (surrounded by boundary vectors, so the result is a scalar). For S=1/2 spins on a lattice, there are two matrices associated to each lattice site; which matrix goes into the product depends on whether the spin is up or down. If the matrix sizes required to capture the true wavefunction do not grow with system size, then the MPS format compresses exponentially many parameters down to only a linear number of parameters! (That is, linear in the system size.)

Whether the MPS approach can usefully compress the wavefunction of a physical system hinges on its dimensionality and how much quantum entanglement it has across various spatial cuts. For "lightly" entangled, one-dimensional quantum states, such as ground states of local 1D Hamiltonians, MPS work incredibly well. There is a proof of their optimality for a wide set of cases. MPS are even useful for two-dimensional systems with extra computational effort.

Inspired by the success of the MPS tensor network, other tensor network proposals followed, such as the PEPS network for two-dimensional quantum systems (Verstraete,2004) and the MERA network for critical systems (Vidal,2007). Both of these are trickier to use than MPS, but offer a more compression, and in the case of MERA, deeper physics insights.

## Tensor network machines

High-dimensional spaces pop up everywhere in machine learning theory. So tensor networks seem a natural tool to try (with benefit of hindsight, of course). There have already been creative proposals to use MPS (also known as tensor trains) to parameterize Bayesian models (Novikov,2014); to perform PCA/SVD analysis of huge matrices (Lee,2014); to extract useful features from data tensors (Bengua,2015); and to parameterize neural net layers (Novikov,2015).

But which machine learning framework is most natural for tensor networks, in the sense of applying the full power of optimization techniques, insights, and generalizations of MPS developed in physics?

Two recent papers propose that tensor networks could be especially powerful in the setting of non-linear kernel learning: Novikov,Trofimov,Oseledets (2016) and Stoudenmire,Schwab (2016). Kernel learning basically means optimizing a decision function of the form

$$f(\mathbf{x}) = W\cdot\Phi(\mathbf{x})$$

where $\mathbf{x}$ is a moderate-size vector of inputs (e.g. pixels of an image) and the output $f(\mathbf{x})$ determines how to classify each input.

The function $\Phi(\mathbf{x})$ is known as the feature map. Its role is to "lift" inputs $\mathbf{x}$ to a higher dimensional feature space before they are classified. The feature map $\Phi$ is a non-linear yet rather generic and simple function, in the sense of having only a few adjustable "hyper parameters" (a common example of a feature map is the one associated with the polynomial kernel).

The weight vector $W$ contain the actual parameters of the model to be learned. The clever thing about kernel learning is although the inputs enter non-linearly via the feature map $\Phi$, the weights $W$ enter linearly — the model is just a linear classifier in feature space. The number of weights is determined by the dimensionality of the feature space (the target space of $\Phi$). A higher-dimensional feature space can produce a more powerful model, but also requires optimizing more weights. In some common approaches, the number of weight parameters to optimize can be exponentially big or even infinite.

But this smells like a perfect problem for tensor networks: finding the best set of linear weights in an exponentially big space.

To obtain a weight vector with a structure like a quantum wavefunction, and suitable for the tensor network approximations used in physics, recall that combining independent quantum systems corresponds to taking a tensor product of their state spaces. For a feature map mimicking this rule, first map each component $x_j$ of the input vector $\mathbf{x}$ into a small d-dimensional vector via a local feature map $\phi(x_j)$. Then combine these local feature vectors using a tensor product:

$$\Phi^{s\_1 s\_2 \cdots s\_N}(\mathbf{x}) = \phi^{s\_1}(x\_1) \otimes \phi^{s\_2}(x\_2) \otimes \cdots \otimes \phi^{s\_N}(x\_N)$$

The result is a $d^N$ dimensional feature vector. However, it has the structure of a product-state wavefunction (or rank-1 tensor in applied math parlance), making it easy to store and manipulate.

With the above construction, $W$ also has $d^N$ components, and has the structure of an $N^\text{th}$ order tensor (N indices of size d). This is an object in the same mathematical space as a wavefunction of N spins (d=2 corresponding to S=1/2, d=3 to S=1, etc.). But while some wavefunctions in state space (now feature space) are readily compressible into tensor networks, the vast majority cannot be compressed at all. Do weights of machine learning models live in the same nicely compressible part of state space as tensor networks?

In lieu of a general answer, we did an experiment. Our work (Stoudenmire,2016) considered grayscale image data of handwritten digits (the MNIST data set). Taking an ad-hoc local feature map which maps grayscale pixels into two-component vectors mimicking S=1/2 spins, we trained a model to distinguish the digits 0,1,2,...,9. We approximated the weight tensor $W$ as an MPS and optimized it by minimizing a squared-error cost function. The results were surprisingly good: for a very modest size of 100 by 100 matrices in the MPS, we obtained over 99% classification accuracy on the training and test data sets. The experiments of Novikov,2016 considered another standard data set and synthetic, highly correlated data and found similarly good results.

Compressing the weight tensor into an MPS is interesting, but what are the benefits for machine learning?

One immediate gain comes from optimizing the weights directly. The typical way to avoid the costs of high-dimensional feature space is avoid touching the weights by using the so-called "kernel trick" which keeps the weights hidden in favor of alternate "dual variables". But this trick requires constructing a kernel matrix whose number of entries grows quadratically with training set size. In the era of big data, this scaling issue is cited as one reason why neural nets have overtaken kernel methods. In contrast, optimizing the weights as an MPS scales at most linearly in the training set size (for a fixed size of the MPS matrices). The cost of applying or testing the model is independent of training set size.

The simplicity of a model where the decision function depends linearly on the weights also makes it straightforward to import past insights and powerful optimization techniques developed in the physics community. Instead of using gradient descent / backpropagation, we borrowed the powerful DMRG technique for optimizing the weights (also known as alternating least squares in applied math). Not only is DMRG very efficient, but it is adaptive, allowing the matrix dimensions of our MPS to grow in regions where more resources are needed and shrink in less important regions, such as near the boundary of an image where the pixels do not vary. In the future we could take advantage of DMRG developments, such as the use of conserved "quantum numbers"; continuous MPS for data in the continuum limit; or real-space parallel DMRG for optimizing large models on distributed hardware.

Finally, tensor networks may enhance interpretability and generalization. While more work is needed on these fronts, the linearity of tensor networks could lead to rapid progress. The MPS format already lends itself to an interpretation as an "finite state machine" processed in different ways depending on the input data. Putting in a tensor network like the MERA instead might lead to interpretations similar to deep neural network architectures, yet easier to analyze by virtue of being linear. Intriguingly, a tensor network model need not obey the "representer theorem"; this means tensor network models do not just interpolate the training set data, which could improve generalization.

Will the tensor network approach continue to be successful for more difficult data sets? How do its costs compare to neural networks for problems where both yield similar performance? Can tensor networks outperform neural networks on certain problems?

Given the excellent track record of tensor networks in physics, and the deep theoretical underpinnings of kernel learning the future could be bright.

## Appendix: A brief history of tensor networks

Tensor networks as a computational tool originated in the field of quantum physics (not to be confused with neural tensor networks). Early on they were considered for describing the mathematical structure of exotic states of quantum spin models, such as the AKLT chain (Accardi,1981; Lange,1994).

The tensor network known as the matrix product state (MPS) came into prominence with the development of the DMRG algorithm (White,1992; Schollwoeck,2011), later shown to be a particularly efficient algorithm for optimizing MPS to approximate ground states of quantum systems (Ostlund,1995).

Since then, tensor networks have been influential in many areas of physics such as quantum chemistry (Chan,2011), condensed matter physics (Bridgeman,2016), and even in quantum gravity, where tensor networks have been proposed as a model of how gravity could emerge from quantum mechanics (Swingle,2012; Quanta Magazine,2015). Some key developments in tensor network technology were the proposal of the PEPS network for two-dimensional quantum systems (Verstraete,2004) and the MERA network for critical systems (Vidal,2007).

More recently, there has been growing interest in tensor networks within the applied mathematics community following the proposal of the hierarchical Tucker (Hackbush,2009) and tensor train (Oseledets,2011) decompositions (respectively known in the physics literature as the tree tensor network and MPS decompositions).