The unbearable lightness of Restricted Boltzmann Machines: Theoretical Insights and Biological Applications

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: di Sarra, Giovanni, Bravi, Barbara, Roudi, Yasser
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author di Sarra, Giovanni
Bravi, Barbara
Roudi, Yasser
author_facet di Sarra, Giovanni
Bravi, Barbara
Roudi, Yasser
contents Restricted Boltzmann Machines are simple yet powerful neural networks. They can be used for learning structure in data, and are used as a building block of more complex neural architectures. At the same time, their simplicity makes them easy to use, amenable to theoretical analysis, yielding interpretable models in applications. Here, we focus on reviewing the role that the activation functions, describing the input-output relationship of single neurons in RBM, play in the functionality of these models. We discuss recent theoretical results on the benefits and limitations of different activation functions. We also review applications to biological data analysis, namely neural data analysis, where RBM units are mostly taken to have sigmoid activation functions and binary units, to protein data analysis and immunology where non-binary units and non-sigmoid activation functions have recently been shown to yield important insights into the data. Finally, we discuss open problems addressing which can shed light on broader issues in neural network research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_04387
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The unbearable lightness of Restricted Boltzmann Machines: Theoretical Insights and Biological Applications
di Sarra, Giovanni
Bravi, Barbara
Roudi, Yasser
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Machine Learning
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Restricted Boltzmann Machines are simple yet powerful neural networks. They can be used for learning structure in data, and are used as a building block of more complex neural architectures. At the same time, their simplicity makes them easy to use, amenable to theoretical analysis, yielding interpretable models in applications. Here, we focus on reviewing the role that the activation functions, describing the input-output relationship of single neurons in RBM, play in the functionality of these models. We discuss recent theoretical results on the benefits and limitations of different activation functions. We also review applications to biological data analysis, namely neural data analysis, where RBM units are mostly taken to have sigmoid activation functions and binary units, to protein data analysis and immunology where non-binary units and non-sigmoid activation functions have recently been shown to yield important insights into the data. Finally, we discuss open problems addressing which can shed light on broader issues in neural network research.
title The unbearable lightness of Restricted Boltzmann Machines: Theoretical Insights and Biological Applications
topic Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Machine Learning
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04387