Networks of Hebbian networks: more is different

The common thread behind the recent Nobel Prize in Physics to John Hopfield and those conferred to Giorgio Parisi in 2021 and Philip Anderson in 1977 is disorder. Quoting Philip Anderson: more is different. This principle has been extensively demonstrated in magnetic systems and spin glasses, and, in this work, we test its validity on Hopfield neural networks to show how an assembly of these models displays emergent capabilities that are not present at a single network level. Such an assembly is designed as a layered associative Hebbian network that, beyond accomplishing standard pattern recognition, spontaneously performs also pattern disentanglement. Namely, when inputted with a composite signal – e.g., a musical chord – it can return the single constituting elements – e.g., the notes making up the chord. Here, restricting to notes coded as Rademacher vectors and chords that are their mixtures (i.e., spurious states), we use tools borrowed from statistical mechanics of disordered systems to investigate this task, obtaining the conditions over the model control-parameters such that pattern disentanglement is successfully executed.