26 July 2026 to 1 August 2026
University of Maryland, College Park
US/Eastern timezone

A variational framework for variance reduction in lattice field theory

31 Jul 2026, 14:40
20m
Benjamin Banneker B (Adele H. Stamp Student Union)

Benjamin Banneker B

Adele H. Stamp Student Union

3972 Campus Dr, College Park, MD 20742
Contributed talk Algorithms and artificial intelligence Algorithms and artificial intelligence

Speaker

Pietro Butti (QTC, University of Southern Denmark)

Description

The signal-to-noise problem limits the reach of many lattice calculations. We present a variational framework that recasts it as a transport problem: the loss of signal reflects a mismatch between the distribution one samples and the one needed to measure an observable, and can be reduced by transporting configurations to close that gap.
The optimal transport is typically determined either through a stochastic estimator based on Langevin dynamics or by parametrising it as a normalising flow trained with automatic differentiation. We discuss how the framework brings these methods under a common variational principle and present results for scalar theories.

Authors

Dr Alessandro Nada (University of Turin) Guilherme Catumba (University Milano-Bicocca) Louis Spatscheck (University of Southern Denmark) Pietro Butti (QTC, University of Southern Denmark)

Presentation materials

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