Hamilton-Zero: A Neural Tensor-Network Foundation Model for Ground States of Arbitrary Quadratic Qubit Hamiltonians

A central promise of useful quantum advantage is the ability to compute ground states of Hamiltonian systems beyond the reach of classical simulation methods. Here we demonstrate that this problem can be effectively amortized across an arbitrary and universal set of Hamiltonians by a foundation model with $\sim0.5$B variational parameters, trained with contemporary techniques from large language models and deep reinforcement learning. To do this, we formulate $\text{spin-}1/2$ quantum ground-state learning as manifold variational optimisation over centrally odd scalar functions on $\mathrm{SU}(2)^N$. This replaces explicit Hilbert-space vector amplitudes with manifold functions on which the Hamiltonian acts through Lie derivatives, evaluated by custom automatic differentiation primitives. We prove that the resulting variational principle on this manifold preserves the $\text{spin-}1/2$ sector's ground-state upper bound using the Peter-Weyl theorem, then pre-train our foundation model on a dataset of hundreds of thousands of different Hamiltonian systems, varying the connection topology, system size, interaction types and strengths, bringing together a century of many-body literature. Using a novel $\mathrm{SU}(2)$ replica-exchange Langevin sampler and sharded natural-gradient optimisation, we train our model with our own extension of the Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature (KFAC) optimiser on system sizes up to 64 qubits. On a held-out generalisation dataset, we fine-tune our model on system sizes of up to 1024 qubits, and evaluate on systems up to 8100 qubits.

Semantic Segmentation for Histopathology using Learned Regularization based on Global Proportions

In pathology, the spatial distribution and proportions of tissue types are key indicators of disease progression, and are more readily available than fine-grained annotations. However, these assessments are rarely mapped to pixel-wise segmentation. The task is fundamentally underdetermined, as many spatially distinct segmentations can satisfy the same global proportions in the absence of pixel-wise constraints. To address this, we introduce Variational Segmentation from Label Proportions (VSLP), a two-stage framework that infers dense segmentations from global label proportions, without any pixel-level annotations. This framework first leverages a pre-trained transformer model with test-time augmentation to produce a pixel-wise confidence estimate. In the second stage, these estimates are fused by solving a variational optimization problem that incorporates a Wasserstein data fidelity term alongside a learned regularizer. Unlike end-to-end networks, our variational method can visualize the fidelity-regularization energy, resulting in more interpretable segmentation. We validate our approach on two public datasets, achieving superior performance over existing weakly supervised and unsupervised methods. For one of these datasets, proportions have been estimated by an experienced pathologist to provide a realistic benchmark to the community. Furthermore, the method scales to an in-house dataset with noisy pathologist labels, severely outperforming state-of-the-art methods, thereby demonstrating practical applicability. The code and data will be made publicly available upon acceptance at https://github.com/xiaoliangpi/VSLP.