Rethinking the ill-posedness of the spectral function reconstruction -- why is it fundamentally hard and how Artificial Neural Networks can help

Abstract

Reconstructing hadron spectral functions through Euclidean correlation functions are of the important missions in lattice QCD calculations. However, in a K\"allen--Lehmann(KL) spectral representation, the reconstruction is observed to be ill-posed in practice. It is usually ascribed to the fewer observation points compared to the number of points in the spectral function. In this paper, by solving the eigenvalue problem of continuous KL convolution, we show analytically that the ill-posedness of the inversion is fundamental and it exists even for continuous correlation functions. We discussed how to introduce regulators to alleviate the predicament, in which include the Artificial Neural Networks(ANNs) representations recently proposed by the Authors in~[Phys. Rev. D 106 (2022) L051502]. The uniqueness of solutions using ANNs representations is manifested analytically and validated numerically. Reconstructed spectral functions using different regularization schemes are also demonstrated, together with their eigen-mode decomposition. We observe that components with large eigenvalues can be reliably reconstructed by all methods, whereas those with low eigenvalues need to be constrained by regulators.