In an informal way, a number of thoughts on the financial crisis 2008 are presented from a physicist's viewpoint, considering the problem as a nonergodicity transition of a spin-glass type of system. Some tentative suggestions concerning the way out of the crisis are also discussed, concerning Keynesian "deficit spendi…
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We consider the problem of rational decision making in the presence of nonlinear constraints. By using tools borrowed from spin glass and random matrix theory, we focus on the portfolio optimisation problem. We show that the number of ``optimal'' solutions is generically exponentially large: rationality is thus de fact…
Statistical learning theory connects to spin glass models via Rademacher complexity and replica theory.
Generative model learns spin-glass dynamics and properties.
Derives TAP approximation for Bayesian linear regression.
The study reveals the spectral structure of attention layers and its implications for generalization.
We analyze operational risk in terms of a spin glass model. Several regimes are investigated, as a functions of the parameters that characterize the dynamics. The system is found to be robust against variations of these parameters. We unveil the presence of limit cycles and scrutinize the features of the asymptotic sta…
Injectivity of ReLU networks studied using statistical physics.
We study the problem of detecting the presence of a single unknown spike in a rectangular data matrix, in a high-dimensional regime where the spike has fixed strength and the aspect ratio of the matrix converges to a finite limit. This setup includes Johnstone's spiked covariance model. We analyze the likelihood ratio …
Restricted Boltzmann Machines are described by the Gibbs measure of a bipartite spin glass, which in turn corresponds to the one of a generalised Hopfield network. This equivalence allows us to characterise the state of these systems in terms of retrieval capabilities, both at low and high load. We study the paramagnet…
This thesis explores emergent intelligence in disordered systems like spin glasses and neural networks.
MPF method improves parameter estimation in probabilistic models.
Financial markets are a classical example of complex systems as they comprise many interacting stocks. As such, we can obtain a surprisingly good description of their structure by making the rough simplification of binary daily returns. Spin glass models have been applied and gave some valuable results but at the price…
Study higher-order spin glass models for social network behavior with peer-group effects.
New approach uses random matrix theory to understand tensor estimation performance.
Sharp asymptotics reveal how network width controls learnability in quadratic neural networks.
One of the biggest challenges in the field of biomedical imaging is the comprehension and the exploitation of the photon scattering through disordered media. Many studies have pursued the solution to this puzzle, achieving light-focusing control or reconstructing images in complex media. In the present work, we investi…
Study free energy in spherical spin glasses, proving universality dichotomy.
Unified approach learns Ising models from various dynamics and data types.
New insights into optimal portfolios and ecological equilibria reveal surprising complexity.
Minimal DAMs can recognize patterns in high noise, even with minimal data.
Restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) are energy-based neural-networks which are commonly used as the building blocks for deep architectures neural architectures. In this work, we derive a deterministic framework for the training, evaluation, and use of RBMs based upon the Thouless-Anderson-Palmer (TAP) mean-field appro…
Deep neural networks are workhorse models in machine learning with multiple layers of non-linear functions composed in series. Their loss function is highly non-convex, yet empirically even gradient descent minimisation is sufficient to arrive at accurate and predictive models. It is hitherto unknown why are deep neura…
In this article we use the Mean-Variance Model in order to measure the current market state. In our study we take the approach of detecting the overall alignment of portfolios in the spin picture. The projection to the ground-states enables us to use physical observables in order to describe the current state of the ex…
In this paper I give a brief introduction to a family of simple but non-trivial models designed to increase our understanding of collective processes in markets, the so-called Minority Games, and their non-equilibrium statistical mathematical analysis. Since the most commonly studied members of this family define disor…
A statistical physics model for the time evolutions of stock portfolios is proposed. In this model the time series of price changes are coded into the sequences of up and down spins. The Hamiltonian of the system is introduced and is expressed by spin-spin interactions as in spin glass models of disordered magnetic sys…
Recurring international financial crises have adverse socioeconomic effects and demand novel regulatory instruments or strategies for risk management and market stabilization. However, the complex web of market interactions often impedes rational decisions that would absolutely minimize the risk. Here we show that, for…
Gradient span algorithms show consistent progress in high dimensions.
New algorithm nearly achieves ground state free energy of SK model.
We propose a hierarchy for approximate inference based on the Dobrushin, Lanford, Ruelle (DLR) equations. This hierarchy includes existing algorithms, such as belief propagation, and also motivates novel algorithms such as factorized neighbors (FN) algorithms and variants of mean field (MF) algorithms. In particular, w…
The local geometry of high dimensional neural network loss landscapes can both challenge our cherished theoretical intuitions as well as dramatically impact the practical success of neural network training. Indeed recent works have observed 4 striking local properties of neural loss landscapes on classification tasks: …
The Unlearning algorithm improves neural network performance in memory tasks.
Finding minima of a real valued non-convex function over a high dimensional space is a major challenge in science. We provide evidence that some such functions that are defined on high dimensional domains have a narrow band of values whose pre-image contains the bulk of its critical points. This is in contrast with the…
Deep learning has become a powerful and popular tool for a variety of machine learning tasks. However, it is challenging to understand the mechanism of deep learning from a theoretical perspective. In this work, we propose a random active path model to study collective properties of deep neural networks with binary syn…
This article is a follow-up of a short essay that appeared in Nature 455, 1181 (2008) [arXiv:0810.5306]. It has become increasingly clear that the erratic dynamics of markets is mostly endogenous and not due to the rational processing of exogenous news. I elaborate on the idea that spin-glass type of problems, where th…
Explains deep learning models and their geometric properties.
We analyze the statistics of daily price change of stock market in the framework of a statistical physics model for the collective fluctuation of stock portfolio. In this model the time series of price changes are coded into the sequences of up and down spins, and the Hamiltonian of the system is expressed by spin-spin…
Paper presents a privacy-preserving algorithm for estimating peer effects using the Ising model.
Semi-supervised learning (SSL) uses unlabeled data for training and has been shown to greatly improve performance when compared to a supervised approach on the labeled data available. This claim depends both on the amount of labeled data available and on the algorithm used. In this paper, we compute analytically the ga…
Dense neural networks learn efficiently with large datasets and noise.
Study on Langevin dynamics for recovering planted signals in spiked matrix models.
We discuss the portfolio optimization problem with the obligatory deposits constraint. Recently it has been shown that as a consequence of this nonlinear constraint, the solution consists of an exponentially large number of optimal portfolios, completely different from each other, and extremely sensitive to any changes…
We propose a method for solving statistical mechanics problems defined on sparse graphs. It extracts a small Feedback Vertex Set (FVS) from the sparse graph, converting the sparse system to a much smaller system with many-body and dense interactions with an effective energy on every configuration of the FVS, then learn…
Recent experimental advances in neuroscience have opened new vistas into the immense complexity of neuronal networks. This proliferation of data challenges us on two parallel fronts. First, how can we form adequate theoretical frameworks for understanding how dynamical network processes cooperate across widely disparat…
Geometric Brownian motion (GBM) is a key model for representing self-reproducing entities. Self-reproduction may be considered the definition of life [5], and the dynamics it induces are of interest to those concerned with living systems from biology to economics. Trajectories of GBM are distributed according to the we…
We study the fundamental limits of detecting the presence of an additive rank-one perturbation, or spike, to a Wigner matrix. When the spike comes from a prior that is i.i.d. across coordinates, we prove that the log-likelihood ratio of the spiked model against the non-spiked one is asymptotically normal below a certai…
New algorithm Momentum-QNG improves optimization of quantum circuits.
We investigate the signal reconstruction performance of sparse linear regression in the presence of noise when piecewise continuous nonconvex penalties are used. Among such penalties, we focus on the SCAD penalty. The contributions of this study are three-fold: We first present a theoretical analysis of a typical recon…