Learning quantum symmetries with interactive quantum-classical variational algorithms

A symmetry of a state $\vert \psi \rangle$ is a unitary operator of which $\vert \psi \rangle$ is an eigenvector. When $\vert \psi \rangle$ is an unknown state supplied by a black-box oracle, the state's symmetries provide key physical insight into the quantum system; symmetries also boost many crucial quantum learning techniques. In this paper, we develop a variational hybrid quantum-classical learning scheme to systematically probe for symmetries of $\vert \psi \rangle$ with no a priori assumptions about the state. This procedure can be used to learn various symmetries at the same time. In order to avoid re-learning already known symmetries, we introduce an interactive protocol with a classical deep neural net. The classical net thereby regularizes against repetitive findings and allows our algorithm to terminate empirically with all possible symmetries found. Our scheme can be implemented efficiently on average with non-local SWAP gates; we also give a less efficient algorithm with only local operations, which may be more appropriate for current noisy quantum devices. We simulate our algorithm on representative families of states, including cluster states and ground states of Rydberg and Ising Hamiltonians. We also find that the numerical query complexity scales well with qubit size.