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Hauptverfasser: Decelle, Aurélien, Gómez, Alfonso de Jesús Navas, Seoane, Beatriz
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07844
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author Decelle, Aurélien
Gómez, Alfonso de Jesús Navas
Seoane, Beatriz
author_facet Decelle, Aurélien
Gómez, Alfonso de Jesús Navas
Seoane, Beatriz
contents Energy-based learning is a powerful framework for generative modelling, but its training is inherently non-convex, leading potentially to sensitivity to initialisation, poor local optima, and unstable gradient dynamics. We present a dynamical analysis of energy-based learning through the lens of the effective model, which can be interpreted as either a generalised Ising model with higher-order interactions or the Fourier expansion of the energy. Under sufficient expressivity, we show that the gradient flow induced by learning strictly positive distributions over binary variables admits two types of fixed points: data-consistent points, which exactly reproduce the target distribution, and spurious points, which satisfy stationarity without matching the target distribution. Around data-consistent points, we show that perturbations are either stable or neutral, with neutral directions leaving the effective model invariant. Finally, we show that gradient dynamics induce a hierarchy in which lower-order interactions are learned before higher-order ones. This provides a mechanistic explanation for the distributional simplicity bias and clarifies why fixed points that are not data-consistent at low orders are not observed in practice.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_07844
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Distributional simplicity bias and effective convexity in Energy Based Models
Decelle, Aurélien
Gómez, Alfonso de Jesús Navas
Seoane, Beatriz
Machine Learning
Energy-based learning is a powerful framework for generative modelling, but its training is inherently non-convex, leading potentially to sensitivity to initialisation, poor local optima, and unstable gradient dynamics. We present a dynamical analysis of energy-based learning through the lens of the effective model, which can be interpreted as either a generalised Ising model with higher-order interactions or the Fourier expansion of the energy. Under sufficient expressivity, we show that the gradient flow induced by learning strictly positive distributions over binary variables admits two types of fixed points: data-consistent points, which exactly reproduce the target distribution, and spurious points, which satisfy stationarity without matching the target distribution. Around data-consistent points, we show that perturbations are either stable or neutral, with neutral directions leaving the effective model invariant. Finally, we show that gradient dynamics induce a hierarchy in which lower-order interactions are learned before higher-order ones. This provides a mechanistic explanation for the distributional simplicity bias and clarifies why fixed points that are not data-consistent at low orders are not observed in practice.
title Distributional simplicity bias and effective convexity in Energy Based Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07844