One More Time: Revisiting Neural Quantum States from a Reinforcement Learning Perspective

Neural quantum states (NQS) provide a flexible and scalable framework for approximating quantum many-body wavefunctions. Among NQS parameterizations, autoregressive models are especially attractive because they enable exact, independent sampling from the Born distribution, avoiding the autocorrelation and mixing issues of Markov chain methods. Yet their optimization remains comparatively underexplored: Adam is a scalable method but ignores function space geometry, while stochastic reconfiguration is principled but costly and numerically fragile in large models. To address this gap, we show that variational energy minimization can be viewed as an advantage policy-gradient problem over the Born distribution, motivating trust-region optimization for NQS training. We introduce Proximal Wavefunction Optimization (PWO), a principled trust-region algorithm that clips probability-ratio changes in the amplitude channel and phase increments in the phase channel. PWO avoids explicit matrix inversion, reuses samples across multiple updates, and combines the scalability of first-order optimization with theoretical guarantees. Across Ising and frustrated $J_1$-$J_2$ one- and two-dimensional spin systems, PWO improves stability and wall-clock convergence over Adam, minSR, and SPRING. Finally, we fine-tune a $1.5$B-parameter RWKV-7 model, demonstrating NQS optimization at a scale over three orders of magnitude beyond prior work.

New non-Euclidean neural quantum states from additional types of hyperbolic recurrent neural networks

In this work, we extend the class of previously introduced non-Euclidean neural quantum states (NQS) which consists only of Poincaré hyperbolic GRU, to new variants including Poincaré RNN as well as Lorentz RNN and Lorentz GRU. In addition to constructing and introducing the new non-Euclidean hyperbolic NQS ansatzes, we generalized the results of our earlier work regarding the definitive outperformances delivered by hyperbolic Poincaré GRU NQS ansatzes when benchmarked against their Euclidean counterparts in the Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) experiments involving the quantum many-body settings of the Heisenberg $J_1J_2$ and $J_1J_2J_3$ models, which exhibit hierarchical structures in the forms of the different degrees of nearest-neighbor interactions. Here, in particular, using larger systems consisting of 100 spins, we found that all four hyperbolic RNN/GRU NQS variants always outperformed their respective Euclidean counterparts. Specifically, for all $J_2$ and $(J_2,J_3)$ couplings considered, including $J_2=0.0$, Lorentz RNN NQS and Poincaré RNN NQS always outperformd Euclidean RNN NQS, while Lorentz/Poincaré GRU NQS always outperformed Euclidean GRU NQS, with a single exception when $J_2=0.0$ for Poincaré GRU NQS. Furthermore, among the four hyperbolic NQS ansatzes, depending on the specific $J_2$ or $(J_2, J_3)$ couplings, on four out of eight experiment settings, Lorentz GRU and Poincaré GRU took turns to be the top performing variant among all Euclidean and hyperbolic NQS ansatzes considered, while Lorentz RNN, with up to three times fewer parameters, was capable of not only surpassing the Euclidean GRU eight out of eight times but also outperforming both Lorentz GRU and Poincaré GRU four out of eight times, to emerge as the best overall hyperbolic NQS ansatz.