Learning Low-Energy Subspace Overlaps in Many-Body Systems with Measurement-Based and Coherent Quantum Strategies

Abstract

Predicting the overlap of quantum states with specified low-energy subspaces is a key diagnostic for quantum many-body dynamics, with direct applications in state preparation, subspace-based algorithms, and the study of thermalization. We study the supervised prediction of subspace overlaps O_K between time-evolved states and K-dimensional low-energy eigenspaces of a 10-qubit Heisenberg spin chain following a local perturbation. We compare two quantum information extraction strategies: measurement-based learning, in which classical shadow features are processed by convolutional neural networks, and coherent quantum learning, in which quantum convolutional neural networks process the state directly. We further introduce physics-informed variants for both approaches, including Hamiltonian-aware shadows and QCNN gates aligned with the Heisenberg exchange structure. Across five dataset configurations spanning weak, moderate, and strong quench regimes, physics-informed QCNNs achieve stable performance, with mean test-set coefficients of determination R^2 = 0.753-0.846. Shadow-based methods show stronger regime dependence: they outperform QCNNs in the moderate-quench regime, reaching R^2 = 0.886, but underperform in weak and strong quenches at default shot budgets, where the best shadow results are R^2 = 0.615 and 0.672, respectively. Hardware validation on Quantinuum and IBM noise models shows that arbitrary state preparation is the dominant limitation, requiring approximately 2,044 two-qubit gates and causing near-complete depolarization before inference. These results identify a regime-dependent tradeoff between measurement-based and coherent quantum learning, with shadow methods excelling when the target remains locally accessible and physics-informed QCNNs providing more robust performance across dynamical regimes.