Hayato Goto

Hayato Goto, Ryo Hidaka, Kosuke Tatsumura

Nonlinear dynamical systems with continuous variables can be used for solving combinatorial optimization problems with discrete variables. Numerical simulations of them are also useful as heuristic algorithms with a desirable property, namely, parallelizability, which allows us to execute them in a massively parallel manner, leading to ultrafast performance. However, the dynamical-system approaches with continuous variables are usually less accurate than conventional approaches with discrete variables such as simulated annealing. To improve the solution accuracy of a quantum-inspired algorithm called simulated bifurcation (SB), which was found from classical simulation of a quantum nonlinear oscillator network exhibiting quantum bifurcation, here we generalize it by introducing nonlinear control of individual bifurcation parameters and show that the generalized SB (GSB) can achieve surprisingly high performance, namely, almost 100% success probabilities for some large-scale problems. As a result, the time to solution for a 2,000-variable problem is shortened to 10 ms by a GSB-based machine, which is two orders of magnitude shorter than the best known value, 1.3 s, previously obtained by an SB-based machine. To examine the reason for the ultrahigh performance, we investigated chaos in the GSB changing the nonlinear-control strength and found that the dramatic increase of success probabilities happens near the edge of chaos. That is, the GSB can find a solution with high probability by harnessing the edge of chaos. This finding suggests that dynamical-system approaches to combinatorial optimization will be enhanced by harnessing the edge of chaos, opening a broad possibility for physics-inspired approaches to combinatorial optimization.

Kentaro Kubo, Hayato Goto

Boltzmann machines (BMs) are powerful energy-based generative models, but their heavy training cost has largely confined practical use to Restricted BMs (RBMs) trained with an efficient learning method called contrastive divergence. More accurate learning typically requires Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) Boltzmann sampling, but it is time-consuming due to the difficulty of parallelization for more expressive models. To address this limitation, we first propose a new Boltzmann sampler inspired by a quantum-inspired combinatorial optimization called simulated bifurcation (SB). This SB-inspired approach, which we name Langevin SB (LSB), enables parallelized sampling while maintaining accuracy comparable to MCMC. Furthermore, this is applicable not only to RBMs but also to BMs with general couplings. However, LSB cannot control the inverse temperature of the output Boltzmann distribution, which hinders learning and degrades performance. To overcome this limitation, we also developed an efficient method for estimating the inverse temperature during the learning process, which we call conditional expectation matching (CEM). By combining LSB and CEM, we establish an efficient learning framework for BMs with greater expressive power than RBMs. We refer to this framework as sampler-adaptive learning (SAL). SAL opens new avenues for energy-based generative modeling beyond RBMs.