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arXiv · 1903.11048

Comment on "Solving Statistical Mechanics Using VANs": Introducing saVANt - VANs Enhanced by Importance and MCMC Sampling

Kim Nicoli·Pan Kessel·Nils Strodthoff·Wojciech Samek·Klaus-Robert Müller·Shinichi Nakajima
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Abstract

In this comment on "Solving Statistical Mechanics Using Variational Autoregressive Networks" by Wu et al., we propose a subtle yet powerful modification of their approach. We show that the inherent sampling error of their method can be corrected by using neural network-based MCMC or importance sampling which leads to asymptotically unbiased estimators for physical quantities. This modification is possible due to a singular property of VANs, namely that they provide the exact sample probability. With these modifications, we believe that their method could have a substantially greater impact on various important fields of physics, including strongly-interacting field theories and statistical physics.

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Kim Nicoli, Pan Kessel, Nils Strodthoff, Wojciech Samek, Klaus-Robert Müller, Shinichi Nakajima. 2019-03-26. Comment on "Solving Statistical Mechanics Using VANs": Introducing saVANt - VANs Enhanced by Importance and MCMC Sampling. https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.11048

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