An interpretable closed form for entanglement entropy from bitstrings, guided by a graph neural network

Abstract

The empirical bitstring distribution is the most accessible observable on Rydberg-atom arrays, but the bipartite von~Neumann entropy it constrains is far costlier to obtain. We present a six-term linear closed form for the entropy, built on bitstring-derivable physics scalars, and characterize its accuracy, portability, scaling behaviour, and calibration cost. The feature set is selected with guidance from a trained graph neural network: probing the network localizes its entropy prediction to the two-point correlators on the bipartition boundary, and an exhaustive ground-truth search restricted to those boundary correlators isolates the form. It reaches $0.024$~nats mean absolute error in distribution: $6.4$ times the network's error, but in a form a human can read and apply without retraining. Fit once and applied unchanged, it has lower error than the base network on five of six out-of-distribution pools and ties the sixth. An independent density-matrix renormalization-group study to one hundred atoms -- five times the reach of exact diagonalization -- settles the size-extrapolation question: coefficients frozen at small size fail at scale, but the failure is structured. Refit per size the form holds to $25$--$50$~mnat (cross-validated); two of its six slopes follow clean inverse-size laws, one a downward curving growth, and the others are trendless; the fitted laws deploy the form label-free at roughly $40$--$80$~mnat. The result fixes a label-budget rule: at large sizes, a few dozen labels recalibrate the closed form to match a fine-tuned in-distribution ensemble on the same features, while nonlinear ML models pull ahead only given large labelled datasets.