Locality-constrained autoregressive cum conditional normalizing flow for lattice field theory simulations

Solving path integrals in quantum field theories for theories with large couplings involves discretization of the underlying spacetime as lattice and numerically sampling the fields using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithmsreferred to as lattice quantum field theory[9]. For large lattice sizes and choices of action parameters that lead to small lattice spacing and large correlation lengths, MCMC methods tend to suffer from long correlation times leading to exponentially diverging computational costs-a phenomenon known as critical slowing down (CSD)[17]. While a few non-local update algorithms have been developed for specific models to address CSD [13, 16], they cannot be applied for many key theories including quantum chromodynamics (QCD). In recent times, machine learning-based methods [19, 18] have been explored for building generative models of statistical and field theories on a lattice.