  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 approximation of widely-connected systems with weak
interactions coming from spin-glass theory. While the TAP approach has been
extensively studied for fully-visible binary spin systems, our construction is
generalized to latent-variable models, as well as to arbitrarily distributed
real-valued spin systems with bounded support. In our numerical experiments, we
demonstrate the effective deterministic training of our proposed models and are
able to show interesting features of unsupervised learning which could not be
directly observed with sampling. Additionally, we demonstrate how to utilize
our TAP-based framework for leveraging trained RBMs as joint priors in
denoising problems.
