New Preprint

New preprint with Kai-Wen Zhao, Wen-Han Kao and Kai-Hsin Wu on Generation of ice states through deep reinforcement learning is now available on the arXiv:1903.04698.

Generation of ice states through deep reinforcement learning

Authors: Kai-Wen Zhao, Wen-Han Kao, Kai-Hsin Wu, Ying-Jer Kao

We present a deep reinforcement learning framework where a machine agent is trained to search for a policy to generate a ground state for the square ice model by exploring the physical environment. After training, the agent is capable of proposing a sequence of local moves to achieve the goal. Analysis of the trained policy and the state value function indicates that the ice rule and loop-closing condition are learned without prior knowledge. We test the trained policy as a sampler in the Markov chain Monte Carlo and benchmark against the baseline loop algorithm. This framework can be generalized to other models with topological constraints where generation of constraint-preserving states is difficult.