Solving the quantum many-body Schr\"odinger equation is a fundamental and challenging problem in the fields of quantum physics, quantum chemistry, and material sciences. One of the common computational approaches to this problem is Quantum Variational Monte Carlo (QVMC), in which ground-state solutions are obtained by minimizing the energy of the system within a restricted family of parameterized wave functions. Deep learning methods partially address the limitations of traditional QVMC by representing a rich family of wave functions in terms of neural networks. However, the optimization objective in QVMC remains notoriously hard to minimize and requires second-order optimization methods such as natural gradient. In this paper, we first reformulate energy functional minimization in the space of Born distributions corresponding to particle-permutation (anti-)symmetric wave functions, rather than the space of wave functions. We then interpret QVMC as the Fisher-Rao gradient flow in this distributional space, followed by a projection step onto the variational manifold. This perspective provides us with a principled framework to derive new QMC algorithms, by endowing the distributional space with better metrics, and following the projected gradient flow induced by those metrics. More specifically, we propose "Wasserstein Quantum Monte Carlo" (WQMC), which uses the gradient flow induced by the Wasserstein metric, rather than Fisher-Rao metric, and corresponds to transporting the probability mass, rather than teleporting it. We demonstrate empirically that the dynamics of WQMC results in faster convergence to the ground state of molecular systems.

In this paper, we firstly extend the physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to learn data-driven stationary and non-stationary solitons of 1D and 2D saturable nonlinear Schr\"odinger equations (SNLSEs) with two fundamental PT-symmetric Scarf-II and periodic potentials in optical fibers. Secondly, the data-driven inverse problems are studied for PT-symmetric potential functions discovery rather than just potential parameters in the 1D and 2D SNLSEs. Particularly, we propose a modified PINNs (mPINNs) scheme to identify directly the PT potential functions of the 1D and 2D SNLSEs by the solution data. And the inverse problems about 1D and 2D PT -symmetric potentials depending on propagation distance z are also investigated using mPINNs method. We also identify the potential functions by the PINNs applied to the stationary equation of the SNLSE. Furthermore, two network structures are compared under different parameter conditions such that the predicted PT potentials can achieve the similar high accuracy. These results illustrate that the established deep neural networks can be successfully used in 1D and 2D SNLSEs with high accuracies. Moreover, some main factors affecting neural networks performance are discussed in 1D and 2D PT Scarf-II and periodic potentials, including activation functions, structures of the networks, and sizes of the training data. In particular, twelve different nonlinear activation functions are in detail analyzed containing the periodic and non-periodic functions such that it is concluded that selecting activation functions according to the form of solution and equation usually can achieve better effect.