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Tensor network contractions are widely used in statistical physics, quantum computing, and computer science. We introduce a method to efficiently approximate tensor network contractions using low-rank approximations, where each intermediate tensor generated during the contractions is approximated as a low-rank binary tree tensor network. The proposed algorithm has the flexibility to incorporate a large portion of the environment when performing low-rank approximations, which can lead to high accuracy for a given rank. Here, the environment refers to the remaining set of tensors in the network, and low-rank approximations with larger environments can generally provide higher accuracy. For contracting tensor networks defined on lattices, the proposed algorithm can be viewed as a generalization of the standard boundary-based algorithms. In addition, the algorithm includes a cost-efficient density matrix algorithm for approximating a tensor network with a general graph structure into a tree structure, whose computational cost is asymptotically upper-bounded by that of the standard algorithm that uses canonicalization. Experimental results indicate that the proposed technique outperforms previously proposed approximate tensor network contraction algorithms for multiple problems in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. 

Tensor contractions are ubiquitous in computational chemistry andphysics, where tensors generally represent states or operators andcontractions express the algebra of these quantities. In this context,the states and operators often preserve physical conservation laws,which are manifested as group symmetries in the tensors. These groupsymmetries imply that each tensor has block sparsity and can be storedin a reduced form. For nontrivial contractions, the memory footprint andcost are lowered, respectively, by a linear and a quadratic factor inthe number of symmetry sectors. State-of-the-art tensor contractionsoftware libraries exploit this opportunity by iterating over blocks orusing general block-sparse tensor representations. Both approachesentail overhead in performance and code complexity. With intuition aidedby tensor diagrams, we present a technique, irreducible representationalignment, which enables efficient handling of Abelian group symmetriesvia only dense tensors, by using contraction-specific reduced forms.This technique yields a general algorithm for arbitrary group symmetriccontractions, which we implement in Python and apply to a variety ofrepresentative contractions from quantum chemistry and tensor networkmethods. As a consequence of relying on only dense tensor contractions,we can easily make use of efficient batched matrix multiplication viaIntel’s MKL and distributed tensor contraction via the Cyclops library,achieving good efficiency and parallel scalability on up to 4096 KnightsLanding cores of a supercomputer.