Neural Networks with a Redundant Representation: Detecting the Undetectable

We consider a three-layer Sejnowski machine and show that features learnt via contrastive divergence have a dual representation as patterns in a dense associative memory of order P = 4. The latter is known to be able to Hebbian store an amount of patterns scaling as NP -1, where N denotes the number of constituting binary neurons interacting P wisely. We also prove that, by keeping the dense associative network far from the saturation regime (namely, allowing for a number of patterns scaling only linearly with N, while P > 2) such a system is able to perform pattern recognition far below the standard signal-to-noise threshold. In particular, a network with P = 4 is able to retrieve information whose intensity is O(1) even in the presence of a noise O(root N) in the large N limit. This striking skill stems from a redundancy representation of patterns-which is afforded given the (relatively) low-load information storage-and it contributes to explain the impressive abilities in pattern recognition exhibited by new-generation neural networks. The whole theory is developed rigorously, at the replica symmetric level of approximation, and corroborated by signal-to-noise analysis and Monte Carlo simulations.