Machine Learning String Standard Models

We briefly overview how, historically, string theory led theoretical physics first to precise problems in algebraic and differential geometry, and thence to computational geometry in the last decade or so, and now, in the last few years, to data science. Using the Calabi-Yau landscape -- accumulated by the collaboration of physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists over the last 4 decades -- as a starting-point and concrete playground, we review some recent progress i...

We revisit the question of predicting both Hodge numbers $h^{1,1}$ and $h^{2,1}$ of complete intersection Calabi-Yau (CICY) 3-folds using machine learning (ML), considering both the old and new datasets built respectively by Candelas-Dale-Lutken-Schimmrigk / Green-H\"ubsch-Lutken and by Anderson-Gao-Gray-Lee. In real world applications, implementing a ML system rarely reduces to feed the brute data to the algorithm. Instead, the typical workflow starts with an exploratory dat...

The latest techniques from Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines (SVM) are used to investigate geometric properties of Complete Intersection Calabi-Yau (CICY) threefolds, a class of manifolds that facilitate string model building. An advanced neural network classifier and SVM are employed to (1) learn Hodge numbers and report a remarkable improvement over previous efforts, (2) query for favourability, and (3) predict discrete symmetries, a highly imbalanced problem to w...

Amidst all candidates of physics beyond the Standard Model, string theory provides a unique proposal for incorporating gauge and gravitational interactions. In string theory, a four-dimensional theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity is obtained automatically if one posits that the additional dimensions predicted by the theory are small and curled up, a concept known as compactification. The gauge sector of the theory is specified by the topology and geometry of the...

We survey some recent applications of machine learning to problems in geometry and theoretical physics. Pure mathematical data has been compiled over the last few decades by the community and experiments in supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised machine learning have found surprising success. We thus advocate the programme of machine learning mathematical structures, and formulating conjectures via pattern recognition, in other words using artificial intelligence to hel...

We review some recent applications of machine learning to algebraic geometry and physics. Since problems in algebraic geometry can typically be reformulated as mappings between tensors, this makes them particularly amenable to supervised learning. Additionally, unsupervised methods can provide insight into the structure of such geometrical data. At the heart of this programme is the question of how geometry can be machine learned, and indeed how AI helps one to do mathematics...

Machine learning techniques are increasingly powerful, leading to many breakthroughs in the natural sciences, but they are often stochastic, error-prone, and blackbox. How, then, should they be utilized in fields such as theoretical physics and pure mathematics that place a premium on rigor and understanding? In this Perspective we discuss techniques for obtaining rigor in the natural sciences with machine learning. Non-rigorous methods may lead to rigorous results via conjec...

We propose a novel approach toward the vacuum degeneracy problem of the string landscape, by finding an efficient measure of similarity amongst compactification scenarios. Using a class of some one million Calabi-Yau manifolds as concrete examples, the paradigm of few-shot machine-learning and Siamese Neural Networks represents them as points in R(3) where the similarity score between two manifolds is the Euclidean distance between their R(3) representatives. Using these meth...

MSSM-like string models from the compactification of the heterotic string on toroidal orbifolds (of the kind $T^6/P$) have distinct phenomenological properties, like the spectrum of vector-like exotics, the scale of supersymmetry breaking, and the existence of non-Abelian flavor symmetries. We show that these characteristics depend crucially on the choice of the underlying orbifold point group $P$. In detail, we use boosted decision trees to predict $P$ from phenomenological ...

We study possible applications of artificial neural networks to examine the string landscape. Since the field of application is rather versatile, we propose to dynamically evolve these networks via genetic algorithms. This means that we start from basic building blocks and combine them such that the neural network performs best for the application we are interested in. We study three areas in which neural networks can be applied: to classify models according to a fixed set of...