Improved Cut Strategy for Tensor Network Contraction Orders

In the field of quantum computing, simulating quantum systems on classical computers is crucial. Tensor networks are fundamental in simulating quantum systems. A tensor network is a collection of tensors, that need to be contracted into a result tensor. Tensor contraction is a generalization of matrix multiplication to higher order tensors. The contractions can be performed in different orders, and the order has a significant impact on the number of floating point operations (flops) needed to get the result tensor. It is known that finding an optimal contraction order is NP-hard. The current state-of-the-art approach for finding efficient contraction orders is to combinine graph partitioning with a greedy strategy. Although heavily used in practice, the current approach ignores so-called free indices, chooses node weights without regarding previous computations, and requires numerous hyperparameters that need to be tuned at runtime. In this paper, we address these shortcomings by developing a novel graph cut strategy. The proposed modifications yield contraction orders that significantly reduce the number of flops in the tensor contractions compared to the current state of the art. Moreover, by removing the need for hyperparameter tuning at runtime, our approach converges to an efficient solution faster, which reduces the required optimization time by at least an order of magnitude.