Nonequilibrium thermodynamics of restricted Boltzmann machines

In this work, we analyze the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of a class of neural networks known as restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) in the context of unsupervised learning. We show how the network is described as a discrete Markov process and how the detailed balance condition and the Maxwell-Boltzmann equilibrium distribution are sufficient conditions for a complete thermodynamics description, including nonequilibrium fluctuation theorems. Numerical simulations in a fully trained RBM are performed and the heat exchange fluctuation theorem is verified with excellent agreement to the theory. We observe how the contrastive divergence functional, mostly used in unsupervised learning of RBMs, is closely related to nonequilibrium thermodynamic quantities. We also use the framework to interpret the estimation of the partition function of RBMs with the annealed importance sampling method from a thermodynamics standpoint. Finally, we argue that unsupervised learning of RBMs is equivalent to a work protocol in a system driven by the laws of thermodynamics in the absence of labeled data.