Ground state phases of the two-dimension electron gas with a unified variational approach

The two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) is a fundamental model, which is drawing increasing interest because of recent advances in experimental and theoretical studies of 2D materials. Current understanding of the ground state of the 2DEG relies on quantum Monte Carlo calculations, based on variational comparisons of different ansatze for different phases. We use a single variational ansatz, a general backflow-type wave function using a message-passing neural quantum state architecture, for a unified description across the entire density range. The variational optimization consistently leads to lower ground-state energies than previous best results. Transition into a Wigner crystal (WC) phase occurs automatically at rs = 37 +/- 1, a density lower than currently believed. Between the liquid and WC phases, the same ansatz and variational search strongly suggest the existence of intermediate states in a broad range of densities, with enhanced short-range nematic spin correlations.

Efficient Numerical Algorithm for Large-Scale Damped Natural Gradient Descent

We propose a new algorithm for efficiently solving the damped Fisher matrix in large-scale scenarios where the number of parameters significantly exceeds the number of available samples. This problem is fundamental for natural gradient descent and stochastic reconfiguration. Our algorithm is based on Cholesky decomposition and is generally applicable. Benchmark results show that the algorithm is significantly faster than existing methods.

DeePKS+ABACUS as a Bridge between Expensive Quantum Mechanical Models and Machine Learning Potentials

Recently, the development of machine learning (ML) potentials has made it possible to perform large-scale and long-time molecular simulations with the accuracy of quantum mechanical (QM) models. However, for high-level QM methods, such as density functional theory (DFT) at the meta-GGA level and/or with exact exchange, quantum Monte Carlo, etc., generating a sufficient amount of data for training a ML potential has remained computationally challenging due to their high cost. In this work, we demonstrate that this issue can be largely alleviated with Deep Kohn-Sham (DeePKS), a ML-based DFT model. DeePKS employs a computationally efficient neural network-based functional model to construct a correction term added upon a cheap DFT model. Upon training, DeePKS offers closely-matched energies and forces compared with high-level QM method, but the number of training data required is orders of magnitude less than that required for training a reliable ML potential. As such, DeePKS can serve as a bridge between expensive QM models and ML potentials: one can generate a decent amount of high-accuracy QM data to train a DeePKS model, and then use the DeePKS model to label a much larger amount of configurations to train a ML potential. This scheme for periodic systems is implemented in a DFT package ABACUS, which is open-source and ready for use in various applications.

DeePKS: a comprehensive data-driven approach towards chemically accurate density functional theory

We propose a general machine learning-based framework for building an accurate and widely-applicable energy functional within the framework of generalized Kohn-Sham density functional theory. To this end, we develop a way of training self-consistent models that are capable of taking large datasets from different systems and different kinds of labels. We demonstrate that the functional that results from this training procedure gives chemically accurate predictions on energy, force, dipole, and electron density for a large class of molecules. It can be continuously improved when more and more data are available.

Deep Density: circumventing the Kohn-Sham equations via symmetry preserving neural networks

The recently developed Deep Potential [Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 143001, 2018] is a powerful method to represent general inter-atomic potentials using deep neural networks. The success of Deep Potential rests on the proper treatment of locality and symmetry properties of each component of the network. In this paper, we leverage its network structure to effectively represent the mapping from the atomic configuration to the electron density in Kohn-Sham density function theory (KS-DFT). By directly targeting at the self-consistent electron density, we demonstrate that the adapted network architecture, called the Deep Density, can effectively represent the electron density as the linear combination of contributions from many local clusters. The network is constructed to satisfy the translation, rotation, and permutation symmetries, and is designed to be transferable to different system sizes. We demonstrate that using a relatively small number of training snapshots, Deep Density achieves excellent performance for one-dimensional insulating and metallic systems, as well as systems with mixed insulating and metallic characters. We also demonstrate its performance for real three-dimensional systems, including small organic molecules, as well as extended systems such as water (up to $512$ molecules) and aluminum (up to $256$ atoms).