Reinforcement Learning for Many-Body Ground State Preparation based on Counter-Diabatic Driving*

The Quantum Approximate Optimization Ansatz (QAOA) is a prominent example of variational quantum algorithms. We propose a generalized QAOA ansatz called CD-QAOA, which is inspired by the counter-diabatic (CD) driving procedure, designed for quantum many-body systems, and optimized using a reinforcement learning (RL) approach. The resulting hybrid control algorithm proves versatile in preparing the ground state of quantum-chaotic many-body spin chains, by minimizing the energy. We show that using terms occurring in the adiabatic gauge potential as additional control unitaries, it is possible to achieve fast high-fidelity many-body control away from the adiabatic regime. While each unitary retains the conventional QAOA-intrinsic continuous control degree of freedom such as the time duration, we take into account the order of the multiple available unitaries appearing in the control sequence as an additional discrete optimization problem. Endowing the policy gradient algorithm with an autoregressive deep learning architecture to capture causality, we train the RL agent to construct optimal sequences of unitaries. The algorithm has no access to the quantum state, and we find that the protocol learned on small systems may generalize to larger systems. By scanning a range of protocol durations, we present numerical evidence for a finite quantum speed limit in the nonintegrable mixed-field spin-1/2 Ising model, and for the suitability of the ansatz to prepare ground states of the spin-1 Heisenberg chain in the long-range and topologically ordered parameter regimes. This work paves the way to incorporate recent success from deep learning for the purpose of quantum many-body control.