Could ChatGPT get an Engineering Degree? Evaluating Higher Education Vulnerability to AI Assistants

AI assistants are being increasingly used by students enrolled in higher education institutions. While these tools provide opportunities for improved teaching and education, they also pose significant challenges for assessment and learning outcomes. We conceptualize these challenges through the lens of vulnerability, the potential for university assessments and learning outcomes to be impacted by student use of generative AI. We investigate the potential scale of this vulnerability by measuring the degree to which AI assistants can complete assessment questions in standard university-level STEM courses. Specifically, we compile a novel dataset of textual assessment questions from 50 courses at EPFL and evaluate whether two AI assistants, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 can adequately answer these questions. We use eight prompting strategies to produce responses and find that GPT-4 answers an average of 65.8% of questions correctly, and can even produce the correct answer across at least one prompting strategy for 85.1% of questions. When grouping courses in our dataset by degree program, these systems already pass non-project assessments of large numbers of core courses in various degree programs, posing risks to higher education accreditation that will be amplified as these models improve. Our results call for revising program-level assessment design in higher education in light of advances in generative AI.

Ab-initio variational wave functions for the time-dependent many-electron Schrödinger equation

Describing the dynamics of many-electron quantum systems is crucial for applications such as predicting electronic structures in quantum chemistry, the properties of condensed matter systems, and the behaviors of complex materials. However, the real-time evolution of non-equilibrium quantum electronic systems poses a significant challenge for theoretical and computational approaches, due to the system's exploration of a vast configuration space. This work introduces a variational approach for fermionic time-dependent wave functions, surpassing mean-field approximations by capturing many-body correlations. The proposed methodology involves parameterizing the time-evolving quantum state, enabling the approximation of the state's evolution. To account for electron correlations, we employ time-dependent Jastrow factors and backflow transformations. We also show that we can incorporate neural networks to parameterize these functions. The time-dependent variational Monte Carlo technique is employed to efficiently compute the optimal time-dependent parameters. The approach is demonstrated in three distinct systems: the solvable harmonic interaction model, the dynamics of a diatomic molecule in intense laser fields, and a quenched quantum dot. In all cases, we show clear signatures of many-body correlations in the dynamics not captured by mean-field methods. The results showcase the ability of our variational approach to accurately capture the time evolution of quantum states, providing insight into the quantum dynamics of interacting electronic systems, beyond the capabilities of mean-field.

Hybrid Ground-State Quantum Algorithms based on Neural Schrödinger Forging

Entanglement forging based variational algorithms leverage the bi-partition of quantum systems for addressing ground state problems. The primary limitation of these approaches lies in the exponential summation required over the numerous potential basis states, or bitstrings, when performing the Schmidt decomposition of the whole system. To overcome this challenge, we propose a new method for entanglement forging employing generative neural networks to identify the most pertinent bitstrings, eliminating the need for the exponential sum. Through empirical demonstrations on systems of increasing complexity, we show that the proposed algorithm achieves comparable or superior performance compared to the existing standard implementation of entanglement forging. Moreover, by controlling the amount of required resources, this scheme can be applied to larger, as well as non permutation invariant systems, where the latter constraint is associated with the Heisenberg forging procedure. We substantiate our findings through numerical simulations conducted on spins models exhibiting one-dimensional ring, two-dimensional triangular lattice topologies, and nuclear shell model configurations.

Empirical Sample Complexity of Neural Network Mixed State Reconstruction

Quantum state reconstruction using Neural Quantum States has been proposed as a viable tool to reduce quantum shot complexity in practical applications, and its advantage over competing techniques has been shown in numerical experiments focusing mainly on the noiseless case. In this work, we numerically investigate the performance of different quantum state reconstruction techniques for mixed states: the finite-temperature Ising model. We show how to systematically reduce the quantum resource requirement of the algorithms by applying variance reduction techniques. Then, we compare the two leading neural quantum state encodings of the state, namely, the Neural Density Operator and the positive operator-valued measurement representation, and illustrate their different performance as the mixedness of the target state varies. We find that certain encodings are more efficient in different regimes of mixedness and point out the need for designing more efficient encodings in terms of both classical and quantum resources.

Learning ground states of gapped quantum Hamiltonians with Kernel Methods

Neural network approaches to approximate the ground state of quantum hamiltonians require the numerical solution of a highly nonlinear optimization problem. We introduce a statistical learning approach that makes the optimization trivial by using kernel methods. Our scheme is an approximate realization of the power method, where supervised learning is used to learn the next step of the power iteration. We show that the ground state properties of arbitrary gapped quantum hamiltonians can be reached with polynomial resources under the assumption that the supervised learning is efficient. Using kernel ridge regression, we provide numerical evidence that the learning assumption is verified by applying our scheme to find the ground states of several prototypical interacting many-body quantum systems, both in one and two dimensions, showing the flexibility of our approach.

Ab-initio quantum chemistry with neural-network wavefunctions

Machine learning and specifically deep-learning methods have outperformed human capabilities in many pattern recognition and data processing problems, in game playing, and now also play an increasingly important role in scientific discovery. A key application of machine learning in the molecular sciences is to learn potential energy surfaces or force fields from ab-initio solutions of the electronic Schr\"odinger equation using datasets obtained with density functional theory, coupled cluster, or other quantum chemistry methods. Here we review a recent and complementary approach: using machine learning to aid the direct solution of quantum chemistry problems from first principles. Specifically, we focus on quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods that use neural network ansatz functions in order to solve the electronic Schr\"odinger equation, both in first and second quantization, computing ground and excited states, and generalizing over multiple nuclear configurations. Compared to existing quantum chemistry methods, these new deep QMC methods have the potential to generate highly accurate solutions of the Schr\"odinger equation at relatively modest computational cost.

Positive-definite parametrization of mixed quantum states with deep neural networks

We introduce the Gram-Hadamard Density Operator (GHDO), a new deep neural-network architecture that can encode positive semi-definite density operators of exponential rank with polynomial resources. We then show how to embed an autoregressive structure in the GHDO to allow direct sampling of the probability distribution. These properties are especially important when representing and variationally optimizing the mixed quantum state of a system interacting with an environment. Finally, we benchmark this architecture by simulating the steady state of the dissipative transverse-field Ising model. Estimating local observables and the R\'enyi entropy, we show significant improvements over previous state-of-the-art variational approaches.

From Tensor Network Quantum States to Tensorial Recurrent Neural Networks

We show that any matrix product state (MPS) can be exactly represented by a recurrent neural network (RNN) with a linear memory update. We generalize this RNN architecture to 2D lattices using a multilinear memory update. It supports perfect sampling and wave function evaluation in polynomial time, and can represent an area law of entanglement entropy. Numerical evidence shows that it can encode the wave function using a bond dimension lower by orders of magnitude when compared to MPS, with an accuracy that can be systematically improved by increasing the bond dimension.

NetKet 3: Machine Learning Toolbox for Many-Body Quantum Systems

We introduce version 3 of NetKet, the machine learning toolbox for many-body quantum physics. NetKet is built around neural-network quantum states and provides efficient algorithms for their evaluation and optimization. This new version is built on top of JAX, a differentiable programming and accelerated linear algebra framework for the Python programming language. The most significant new feature is the possibility to define arbitrary neural network ans\"atze in pure Python code using the concise notation of machine-learning frameworks, which allows for just-in-time compilation as well as the implicit generation of gradients thanks to automatic differentiation. NetKet 3 also comes with support for GPU and TPU accelerators, advanced support for discrete symmetry groups, chunking to scale up to thousands of degrees of freedom, drivers for quantum dynamics applications, and improved modularity, allowing users to use only parts of the toolbox as a foundation for their own code.

Continuous-variable neural-network quantum states and the quantum rotor model

We initiate the study of neural-network quantum state algorithms for analyzing continuous-variable lattice quantum systems in first quantization. A simple family of continuous-variable trial wavefunctons is introduced which naturally generalizes the restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) wavefunction introduced for analyzing quantum spin systems. By virtue of its simplicity, the same variational Monte Carlo training algorithms that have been developed for ground state determination and time evolution of spin systems have natural analogues in the continuum. We offer a proof of principle demonstration in the context of ground state determination of a stoquastic quantum rotor Hamiltonian. Results are compared against those obtained from partial differential equation (PDE) based scalable eigensolvers. This study serves as a benchmark against which future investigation of continuous-variable neural quantum states can be compared, and points to the need to consider deep network architectures and more sophisticated training algorithms.