Exponentially improved efficient machine learning for quantum many-body states with provable guarantees

Solving the ground state and the ground-state properties of quantum many-body systems is generically a hard task for classical algorithms. For a family of Hamiltonians defined on an m-dimensional space of physical parameters, the ground state and its properties at an arbitrary parameter configuration can be predicted via a machine learning protocol up to a prescribed prediction error varepsilon, provided that a sample set (of size N) of the states can be efficiently prepared and measured. In a recent work [Huang et al., Science 377, eabk3333 (2022)], a rigorous guarantee for such a generalization was proved. Unfortunately, an exponential scaling for the provable sample complexity, N=m^calOleft(frac1varepsilonright), was found to be universal for generic gapped Hamiltonians. This result applies to the situation where the dimension of the parameter space is large while the scaling with the accuracy is not an urgent factor. In this work, we consider an alternative scenario where m is a finite, not necessarily large constant while the scaling with the prediction error becomes the central concern. By jointly preserving the fundamental properties of density matrices in the learning protocol and utilizing the continuity of quantum states in the parameter range of interest, we rigorously obtain a polynomial sample complexity for predicting quantum many-body states and their properties, with respect to the uniform prediction error varepsilon and the number of qubits n. Moreover, if restricted to learning local quantum-state properties, the number of samples with respect to n can be further reduced exponentially. Our results provide theoretical guarantees for efficient learning of quantum many-body states and their properties, with model-independent applications not restricted to ground states of gapped Hamiltonians.