Simona Cocco

Jorge Fernandez-de-Cossio-Diaz, Simona Cocco, Remi Monasson

A goal of unsupervised machine learning is to build representations of complex high-dimensional data, with simple relations to their properties. Such disentangled representations make easier to interpret the significant latent factors of variation in the data, as well as to generate new data with desirable features. Methods for disentangling representations often rely on an adversarial scheme, in which representations are tuned to avoid discriminators from being able to reconstruct information about the data properties (labels). Unfortunately adversarial training is generally difficult to implement in practice. Here we propose a simple, effective way of disentangling representations without any need to train adversarial discriminators, and apply our approach to Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM), one of the simplest representation-based generative models. Our approach relies on the introduction of adequate constraints on the weights during training, which allows us to concentrate information about labels on a small subset of latent variables. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated with four examples: the CelebA dataset of facial images, the two-dimensional Ising model, the MNIST dataset of handwritten digits, and the taxonomy of protein families. In addition, we show how our framework allows for analytically computing the cost, in terms of log-likelihood of the data, associated to the disentanglement of their representations.

Thomas Tulinski, Simona Cocco, Rémi Monasson et al.

Energy-based models (EBMs) are flexible generative architectures inspired by statistical physics, but their learning and generative properties remain poorly understood. Here, we analyze a solvable EBM in the high-dimensional limit: the spherical Boltzmann machine (SBM). Combining tools from random matrix theory and dynamical mean-field theory, we: solve exact equations describing the training dynamics of the SBM; compute the Bayesian evidence, which acts as a partition function in parameter space and encodes global properties of the trained model; and uncover cascades of phase transitions that occur both during training and as a function of hyperparameters, related to successive alignment and condensation of the top modes of the coupling matrix to the data. We connect these transitions to sampling-time generative phenomena in a teacher-student scenario, including: sampling temperature tuning, double descent as a function of regularization strength, tempered posterior effects, and out-of-equilibrium effects during training that induce biases in the trained model. We provide numerical evidence demonstrating that all these phenomena appear in standard generative architectures, beyond the SBM.

Emanuele Loffredo, Mauro Pastore, Simona Cocco et al.

Class imbalance in real-world data poses a common bottleneck for machine learning tasks, since achieving good generalization on under-represented examples is often challenging. Mitigation strategies, such as under or oversampling the data depending on their abundances, are routinely proposed and tested empirically, but how they should adapt to the data statistics remains poorly understood. In this work, we determine exact analytical expressions of the generalization curves in the high-dimensional regime for linear classifiers (Support Vector Machines). We also provide a sharp prediction of the effects of under/oversampling strategies depending on class imbalance, first and second moments of the data, and the metrics of performance considered. We show that mixed strategies involving under and oversampling of data lead to performance improvement. Through numerical experiments, we show the relevance of our theoretical predictions on real datasets, on deeper architectures and with sampling strategies based on unsupervised probabilistic models.

Clément Roussel, Simona Cocco, Rémi Monasson

Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM) are bi-layer neural networks used for the unsupervised learning of model distributions from data. The bipartite architecture of RBM naturally defines an elegant sampling procedure, called Alternating Gibbs Sampling (AGS), where the configurations of the latent-variable layer are sampled conditional to the data-variable layer, and vice versa. We study here the performance of AGS on several analytically tractable models borrowed from statistical mechanics. We show that standard AGS is not more efficient than classical Metropolis-Hastings (MH) sampling of the effective energy landscape defined on the data layer. However, RBM can identify meaningful representations of training data in their latent space. Furthermore, using these representations and combining Gibbs sampling with the MH algorithm in the latent space can enhance the sampling performance of the RBM when the hidden units encode weakly dependent features of the data. We illustrate our findings on three datasets: Bars and Stripes and MNIST, well known in machine learning, and the so-called Lattice Proteins, introduced in theoretical biology to study the sequence-to-structure mapping in proteins.

Moshir Harsh, Jérôme Tubiana, Simona Cocco et al.

Distributions of data or sensory stimuli often enjoy underlying invariances. How and to what extent those symmetries are captured by unsupervised learning methods is a relevant question in machine learning and in computational neuroscience. We study here, through a combination of numerical and analytical tools, the learning dynamics of Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM), a neural network paradigm for representation learning. As learning proceeds from a random configuration of the network weights, we show the existence of, and characterize a symmetry-breaking phenomenon, in which the latent variables acquire receptive fields focusing on limited parts of the invariant manifold supporting the data. The symmetry is restored at large learning times through the diffusion of the receptive field over the invariant manifold; hence, the RBM effectively spans a continuous attractor in the space of network weights. This symmetry-breaking phenomenon takes place only if the amount of data available for training exceeds some critical value, depending on the network size and the intensity of symmetry-induced correlations in the data; below this 'retarded-learning' threshold, the network weights are essentially noisy and overfit the data.

Jérôme Tubiana, Simona Cocco, Rémi Monasson

A Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) is an unsupervised machine-learning bipartite graphical model that jointly learns a probability distribution over data and extracts their relevant statistical features. As such, RBM were recently proposed for characterizing the patterns of coevolution between amino acids in protein sequences and for designing new sequences. Here, we study how the nature of the features learned by RBM changes with its defining parameters, such as the dimensionality of the representations (size of the hidden layer) and the sparsity of the features. We show that for adequate values of these parameters, RBM operate in a so-called compositional phase in which visible configurations sampled from the RBM are obtained by recombining these features. We then compare the performance of RBM with other standard representation learning algorithms, including Principal or Independent Component Analysis, autoencoders (AE), variational auto-encoders (VAE), and their sparse variants. We show that RBM, due to the stochastic mapping between data configurations and representations, better capture the underlying interactions in the system and are significantly more robust with respect to sample size than deterministic methods such as PCA or ICA. In addition, this stochastic mapping is not prescribed a priori as in VAE, but learned from data, which allows RBM to show good performance even with shallow architectures. All numerical results are illustrated on synthetic lattice-protein data, that share similar statistical features with real protein sequences, and for which ground-truth interactions are known.