Solving the ground state and the ground-state properties of quantum many-body systems is generically a hard task for classical algorithms. For a family of Hamiltonians defined on an m-dimensional space of physical parameters, the ground state and its properties at an arbitrary parameter configuration can be predicted via a machine learning protocol up to a prescribed prediction error ɛ, provided that a sample set (of size N) of the states can be efficiently prepared and measured. In a recent work [Huang , ], a rigorous guarantee for such a generalization was proved. Unfortunately, an exponential scaling for the provable sample complexity, N=mO(1ɛ), was found to be universal for generic gapped Hamiltonians. This result applies to the situation where the dimension of the parameter space is large, while the scaling with the accuracy is not an urgent factor, not entering the realm of more precise learning and prediction. In this work, we consider an alternative relevant scenario, where the effective dimension m is a finite, not necessarily large constant, while the scaling with the prediction error becomes the central concern. By jointly preserving the fundamental properties of density matrices in the learning protocol and utilizing the continuity of quantum states in the parameter range of interest, we rigorously obtain a polynomial sample complexity for predicting quantum many-body states and their properties, with respect to the prediction error ɛ and the number of qubits, n, with N=poly(ɛ−1,n,ln1δ), where poly denotes a polynomial function, and (1−δ) is the probability of success. Moreover, if restricted to learning local quantum-state properties, the number of samples can be further reduced to N=poly(ɛ−1,lnnδ). Numerical demonstrations confirm our findings, and an alternative approach utilizing statistical learning theory with reproducing kernel Hilbert space achieves consistent results. The mere continuity assumption indicates that our results are not restricted to gapped Hamiltonian systems and properties within the same phase. Published by the American Physical Society 2024