Inferring effective interactions and task-related brain states from large-scale neural activity with Restricted Boltzmann Machines

Abstract

Large-scale electrophysiological recordings now enable the simultaneous monitoring of thousands of neurons across multiple brain regions, revealing structured variability in population activity. Understanding how such collective patterns emerge from microscopic interactions requires models that are both scalable and interpretable. Here, we use Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) to model the activity of $\sim 1500$--$2000$ simultaneously recorded neurons from the Allen Institute for Brain Science Visual Behavior Neuropixels dataset. Compared with conventional pairwise maximum-likelihood approaches, RBMs require substantially fewer parameters, can be trained within minutes, and accurately reproduce higher-order and global empirical statistics. They remain interpretable by defining effective interactions between neurons, including higher-order terms, and uncover dominant coordination patterns that reflect anatomical organization. Analysis of the learned free-energy landscape further identifies task-related brain states, while Monte Carlo sampling captures the global relaxation dynamics observed in the data. These results establish RBMs as efficient, scalable, and interpretable tools for extracting statistical structure from large-scale neural recordings and linking collective neural activity to brain organization and behavior.

19 pages, 13 figures