Parallel Scan Recurrent Neural Quantum States for Scalable Variational Monte Carlo
Authors: Ejaaz Merali, Mohamed Hibat-Allah, Mohammad Kohandel, Richard T. Scalettar, Ehsan Khatami
Organizations: Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Davis, California 95616, USA · Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada · Vector Institute, Toronto, Ontario, M5G 0C6, Canada · Department of Physics and Astronomy, San Jos´e State University, San Jos´e, California 95192, USA
Neural-network quantum states have emerged as a powerful variational framework for quantum many-body systems, with recent progress often driven by massively parallel architectures such as transformers. Recurrent neural network quantum states, however, are frequently regarded as intrinsically sequential and therefore less scalable. Here we revisit this view by showing that modern recurrent architectures can support fast, accurate, and computationally accessible neural quantum state simulations. Using autoregressive recurrent wave functions together with recent advances in parallelizable recurrence, we develop variational ansätze, called parallel scan recurrent neural quantum states (PSR-NQS), which can be trained efficiently within variational Monte Carlo in one and two spatial dimensions. We demonstrate accurate benchmark results and show that, with iterative retraining, our approach reaches two-dimensional spin lattices as large as 52×52 while remaining in agreement with available quantum Monte Carlo data. Our results establish recurrent architectures as a practical and promising route toward scalable neural quantum state simulations with modest computational resources.